How to find leads on Reddit

A Reddit lead is a post where someone describes a problem you solve and is visibly in the market for a solution. That second half is what separates it from a mention. "Our analytics are a mess" is a complaint. "Our analytics are a mess, we are on [tool] and paying $400 a month, what are people using instead?" is a lead with a budget attached.

The phrasings that reliably signal intent are boring and repetitive, which is good news, because it means you can search for them:

Reddit’s own search is better than its reputation if you use the operators. `subreddit:` scopes it, `title:` cuts most of the noise because intent is usually in the title, `self:yes` limits you to text posts, and sorting by new is what you want when you are working a channel rather than researching.

A search that works: `title:(alternative OR recommend OR "what are people using") subreddit:yourniche`, sorted by new. Save it, run it daily, and you have a manual version of a lead feed.

Google is the other half. `site:reddit.com "your category" recommendations` surfaces the threads that are already ranking, which are the ones where a comment keeps paying rent. Add the year to bias towards recent ones.

Most people start by listing the ten words their product is about. It fails in both directions: the head terms are drowned in irrelevant chatter, and the long-tail phrasings where the actual buying questions live never make the list of ten.

The better unit is the problem, described the way a customer would describe it before they know your category exists. Someone shopping for a bookkeeping tool does not post "bookkeeping SaaS" — they post that they are drowning in receipts and their accountant is annoyed with them. That is the post you want, and no keyword list you write in one sitting contains it.

This is also why negative keywords matter more than positive ones after the first week. One noisy word — a common brand name, a generic verb — can drown a whole feed.

The scarce resource is not threads, it is your attention at the end of a working day. Before you open anything, decide the two or three things that make a thread worth your time. In practice they are: does this person have the problem, are they choosing right now, and am I allowed to answer in this subreddit.

Anything that fails the third test is not a lead, it is a trap — which is why checking the sub’s promotion rules belongs at the filtering stage rather than after you have written a comment you cannot post.

For evergreen "what should I use" threads, arriving a day late costs you very little: those threads get read for months and your comment inherits the ranking either way. For a thread that is currently on the front page of a large subreddit, being the twelfth comment instead of the second is most of the value gone.

A daily rhythm is enough for the first kind, which is where nearly all of the compounding value is. Chasing the second kind is how people burn evenings.

The manual version of all this is: a handful of saved searches, run daily, plus a keyword alert tool for the words you are confident about. It works, and plenty of founders run exactly that.

What it does not do is judge. Every alert is still yours to read, every subreddit’s rules are still yours to check, and every comment still starts from a blank box at 11pm. That is the part ReplyHey takes: it derives the terms and the subreddits from your URL, scores each post 0–100 against what you actually sell with the evidence quoted, checks the sub’s live rules, and hands you a draft to edit.