The comment-first strategy

Pick two communities. Not six. Two, where the people you want are actually present, and run this for fourteen days.

The routine

1. Fifteen minutes, once a day
   Set a timer. This is a maintenance task, not a project, and treating it like a project is how it gets abandoned by day four.
2. Two comments minimum, on other people's posts
   Answer a question, add a detail, disagree usefully. Never mention your product. Not once, not subtly.
3. One of the two must be genuinely useful
   Something only you know: a gotcha you hit, a number from your own work, a link to something that isn't yours. 'Great post' is not a contribution, and everyone can tell.
4. Note the names that keep appearing
   Every community has ten people who set its tone. After two weeks you'll know who they are, and whether they've replied to you is the actual measure of whether this is working.

What good looks like at day 14
You've been replied to by name a few times. You know what the community is tired of hearing. You have a rough sense of which of your assumptions about these people were wrong. If none of that is true, another two weeks won't fix it — that community isn't yours.

Then, and only then

• Post in whatever the designated place is, if one exists.
• Open with the community, not the product: what you learned here that changed what you built.
• Ask for something specific and small. 'Does this solve the thing three of you complained about last week' gets answers. 'Feedback welcome' gets nothing.

Why this works when nothing else does

Communities are not distribution channels that happen to have rules — they're groups of people with a shared low opinion of being marketed at. Two weeks of comments doesn't trick anyone. It makes you a person who is there, which is the only category of poster that gets read.

The strongest predictor of whether a launch post gets engagement isn't the post. It's whether anyone in the thread recognises the username.