I'm building a small product for businesses that deal with customers over chat. In September I tried to find customers on Reddit the slow way: open a subreddit, sort by new, read everything, keep a list. A few rounds of that taught me more than I expected. The subreddits I assumed would be full of buyers, r/SaaS, the startup subs, the CRM subs, were full of people like me: founders building tools. The actual buyers were in general small-business communities, and the best ones weren't even in English. r/empreendedorismo in Brazil had shop owners running their whole business from a personal WhatsApp. r/Advogados had lawyers whose clients send them voice notes all day and keep asking for the same documents. I would never have found those from a keyword list. The problem was the time. Reading by hand doesn't scale, and the good posts are gone in a day or two. So I built Lurkbell, a browser extension that watches the subreddits I pick and pings me when a new post matches. Keywords do the rough cut, then an optional AI check reads the post against a plain description like "a shop owner struggling to keep up with customer messages, not someone selling a tool". The first thing it taught me was patience. One of my watches went through 168 new posts in ten hours and found nothing. That's normal. When I later tracked another niche across a dozen subreddits, the real demand came to around 25 posts a month. Low volume, high intent. You don't need a firehose, you need to not miss those 25. The second thing: write the AI criteria like you'd brief a person. A borderline post slipped through once because my description was too narrow. I widened it, and it passed the same post three times out of three after that. It has real limits. It only checks while your browser is open, it reads Reddit through your own logged-in session, it checks every 30 minutes by default, and it only sees new posts. The best complaints about competitors are often buried in the comments of older threads, and I still read those by hand. It's free for 2 watches. Pro is $29 a year, no auto-renewal. Other Reddit tools with AI filtering cost $348 to $600 a year, which is why I made it cheap. It's on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ajgglmimofaadnlicoaglkgejciogeph If you've done this kind of hunting on Reddit, I'm curious where your buyers actually turned out to be.   submitted by   /u/ManufacturerLast7833 [link]   [comments]