Brands growing on Reddit

TheRaceTo10Million: How AfterHour built a community of 348k traders to promote its app

Building a community of 348k traders to promote their app

Brand

AfterHour

Reddit Properties

r/TheRaceTo10Million

r/afterhourHQ

u/afterhourHQ

Overview

Finance app AfterHour has built an enormous community of 348k traders on Reddit - using conversations as a platform to gain new downloads.

The conversations and audiences they host on Reddit are symmetrical with the people they're looking to make use of their app.

Here's how they cultivated a Reddit community from zero, for it to become their main acquisition channel - driving more than 100k app downloads.

Activity Output

  • 100k+ app downloads
  • Brand search volume uplift
  • 348k Reddit community

Reddit is the natural home of finance and trading enthusiasts

Even those unfamiliar with Reddit will likely know the story of the GameStop movement on WallStreetBets – which was eventually serialised by Netflix through its documentary ‘Eat the Rich: The GamStop Saga’.

The mass movement short squeeze showed the incredible power when an online community rallies around a common cause.

This is something finance app AfterHour clearly demonstrates, having built a passionate community of traders through its own sub-reddit TheRaceTo10Million.

The app allows investors to follow their favourite tickers and copy the best trades through live alerts (signals) before big moves take place.

The exclusive channel they used to grow to 100k+ app users

The interesting thing about AfterHour is that they’ve built their app to more than 100k users exclusively through their Reddit community.

SimilarWeb helps illustrate just how much of their social traffic arrives via Reddit:

afterhour similarweb traffic sources

And the vast majority of Direct and Organic traffic arrives through brand discovery as a result of their Reddit activity too.

How AfterHour cultivates their target audience through Reddit

AfterHour’s community on Reddit is built from the ground up to appeal to their target audience:

  • The name ‘TheRaceTo10Million’ is clearly chosen to appeal to the aspirations of their target audience
  • The community description is used to promote the app and website URL
  • Community bookmarks are optimised for community members to sign up and use the app
  • Stickied comments on popular conversations are used to promote the app and its benefits
  • Content is purposefully curated to appeal to their target audience and avoids being too self-promotional

With 348k community subscribers, the sub-reddit is amongst the top 1% of communities by size.

And now that they have organic content being created by their extensive subscriber base, the community will inevitably continue to grow exponentially and drive organic app users for AfterHour.

How Reddit helps boost brand awareness and brand search volume

One of the other huge benefits which might not be immediately apparent is the way in which this Reddit activity drives brand search volume.

The increased brand awareness through their Reddit activity leads to users searching for the app in Google.

Brand search volume in 2025 is one of the main ranking factors in Google’s algorithm – so their Reddit activity is inadvertently helping them rank better for keywords in Google search.

This is why we always argue that activity on Reddit isn’t limited to the platform itself – it’s brand building activity that is essential for growth.