When Quo’s co-founder Daryna started posting on Reddit in 2018, she wasn’t even thinking about building a subreddit. She was just showing up where her potential customers already were.
Fast forward to today, and the r/Quo community has become one of our most valuable channels — for support, feedback, and visibility. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way and what it takes to build an engaged community.
r/OpenPhone: The beginning
In 2019, Daryna created r/OpenPhone (Psst, in case you didn’t know, OpenPhone is now Quo). “I started seeing more OpenPhone mentions on Reddit, so it was a matter of time before someone else started the subreddit,” she says.
She had spent a year commenting on small business subreddits where it made sense and introducing folks to OpenPhone. Posting from her personal account, she provided helpful advice related to the product rather than leading with a branded community from day one.
In the beginning, r/OpenPhone was used as an announcement channel for product and company updates:
OpenPhone API – Coming soon (Fall 2024)
by u/darynak in openphone
Fast forward to 2023, and there was an increasing number of product questions and support-related discussions like this one:
OpenPhone Changing to Quo? What Does This Mean For Us?
by u/copete77 in openphone
The engagement was great, but we wanted to make sure we were being responsive. To keep up with the volume, we created a social support team composed of the VP of CX, the social media manager, and two senior social support representatives.
How moderation evolved with growth
As we quickly realized the community needed more active monitoring, we put a few frameworks in place to make it work:
- Full-time moderation: Two of our senior social support representatives split moderation into two shifts each day over a 40-hour work week, Monday to Friday. This helped us meet our response time goal of under an hour as much as possible.
- Casual response style: Answering email tickets and responding to a Reddit DM are worlds apart. Our support team has refined their casual responses through trial and error to match the style of posters. Think: “OMG that’s not how it should work. Let me help you with that.”
- Manual review and social listening: Most social listening tools are incompatible with Reddit, so we have to rely on manually monitoring notifications in Reddit.
- Triaging flair system: To keep track of people with open support tickets who posted on Reddit, we created a system with mods-only flairs. These include: Support – resolved, Support – answered, and Support – closed (no response from poster). This helps us avoid double-dipping on responses, saves us time by eliminating internal follow-ups, and makes sure customers get help fast.
But logistics alone don’t build a community; the rules we put in place were just as important. Here’s how the most important rules break down:
- Be kind and constructive: We decided to remove posts with non-constructive negative feedback. If we’re ever on the fence about whether something is constructive, we discuss it as a team.
- Protect your privacy: We also remove compliance-related posts — people who post about blocked accounts need those issues to be handled offline for security reasons.
- Ticket numbers are required: If folks need help with an active porting or support request, we ask them to include a ticket number in their post to keep things organized.
- No duplicate posts: To keep the subreddit easy to navigate, we ask folks not to post about the same topic multiple times. For example, we coordinate with engineering during outages so we can be the first to post about it, serving as the source of truth.
- No repeat posting or cross-posting: We get it. When something’s not working, customers want answers fast. But cross-posting the same issue across Reddit, X, and LinkedIn makes it harder for us to help folks efficiently, so we ask that posters stick to one channel.
Of course, moderation only goes so far — the content is what keeps people coming back.
Content that works well on Reddit
Here are a few overarching content types we keep in mind:
- New product features and improvements: Even if it helps just one person, we think it’s worth posting. This includes product updates, partnerships, and integrations. When new features launch, we’ll go through the subreddit to tag everyone who requested that feature or update. When people see you’re dependable, they start to trust you.
Five new features, unwrapped 🎁
by u/Quo_N in quo
- Responding to posts from users struggling with simple issues: In the past, we would respond “send us a DM” for posts with support issues. Now, we also add public resolutions so others can see them and contribute.
Quo API not seem to be working
by u/ColdAssociation9274 in quo
- Educational tips and tricks: We show how people are using existing features rather than just announcing them.
New in Quo: Delete individual steps in the call flow builder
by u/Quo_Steph in quo
- AMAs: We feature people our community will be excited to talk to, whether that’s folks from our internal leadership team, like our co-founder Mahyar, or external experts, like the CEO of Zapier. These are a great way to get people to learn about our subreddit, since AMA guests promote them on their own platforms.
AMA with Wade Foster, CEO and Co-Founder of Zapier (Thursday Dec 4, 12 PT / 3 ET)
by u/Quo_Steph in quo
- Co-founders asking for feedback: Daryna still posts questions on the subreddit to stay aware of customers’ most pressing needs.
What’s a delighter / papercut you’d like us to ship next?
by u/darynak in quo
What we’ve learned
Showing up consistently with the right approach has taught us a lot about what makes a Reddit community actually work. We’ve gained more unfiltered product feedback than on any other channel — many features have come directly from posts in our community.
And the investment compounds over time. Old content on r/OpenPhone still drives traffic, Google prioritizes forum content in search results, LLMs cite Reddit threads, and people trust Reddit. The content we create on Reddit today with the help of our community keeps working long after we post it.
