Lead gen
Send founders daily lists of people asking for their product
Build a tool that watches Reddit, X and Hacker News for posts asking for a recommendation, looking for an alternative to a competitor, or complaining about a problem. It scores each post for how ready the person is to buy and drafts a reply. Software founders pay a subscription to see these people before their competitors do.
The hard part: standing out against many similar tools and making the scores good enough that founders keep checking the list.
Who pays
Founders of software products pay a monthly or yearly subscription for scored leads and drafted replies. WasimShips counts 8+ existing Reddit lead tools priced from $7 to $79/month. Jacob_Rhodes_ reports a handful of early paying customers and sells founding plans at $250/yr, which is the poster's own report. You can stand out by scoring true buying intent instead of matching keywords.
How to build it
Choose what to listen for
For each customer, list competitor names, phrases that describe the problem, and requests like 'recommend a tool for' in their category. Store the lists in Supabase.
Collect new posts every hour
Use an n8n workflow that runs every hour, searches public Reddit and Hacker News for those phrases, and uses Grok to search X. Save each new post to Supabase.
Score each post for buying intent
Send every post to a decision model (a fast AI that only makes yes/no or scoring calls) with a 0-10 rubric. The rubric should separate venting, like 'I hate my CRM', from ready-to-buy posts, like 'looking for a CRM under $50/mo for a 3-person team'.
Draft replies for top leads
For posts above your score cutoff, have Grok draft a helpful reply in the founder's voice that answers the question first and mentions the product only where it fits.
Deliver the list and learn
Send each customer a daily list by email or Slack, with thumbs up and down buttons. Use their votes to adjust the phrases and scoring for their market.
Charge with a simple page
Put a signup page on Vercel and charge monthly or yearly plans through Stripe checkout.
Sources on X
- Jacob_Rhodes_ · Apr 27, 2026
Jacob_Rhodes_ says they built OnPilot over 6 weeks with no marketing budget and now have a handful of early paying customers (the poster's own report). OnPilot scans Reddit and X every hour, scores each post by buying intent (0–10), drafts a reply in your voice, and improves from upvotes and downvotes. The poster prices founding member spots at $250/yr.
- WasimShips · Apr 25, 2026
WasimShips lists 8+ Reddit lead tools priced from $7 to $79/month and says most of them only find posts. One gap the poster names is that intent scoring cannot tell 'I hate my CRM' (venting) apart from 'looking for CRM under $50/mo for 3-person team' (ready to buy). The poster also reports that reply rates went from 2% cold to 18% with context.
- Atharv_Golait · Jul 10, 2026
Atharv_Golait is building Eavesdrop. It watches Reddit, X and Hacker News for posts like 'looking for an alternative to X', scores each one by real buying intent rather than keyword matches, and learns from thumbs up and down. The poster's stated goal is $10k MRR.
- KWatchio · Jul 13, 2026
KWatchio argues that the strongest buying signal is someone asking right now for an alternative to a competitor or help with a problem. The suggested workflow is to monitor competitor names, problem phrases and 'recommend a tool for' posts, send alerts to Slack, let AI sentiment sort them, and reply as a helpful human. The poster says its free plan covers Reddit and Hacker News keywords.
- shiftmick · Sep 15, 2026
shiftmick describes Reddit Lead Finder on Apify. It scans public Reddit for posts asking for a tool, complaining about rivals or ready to switch, and returns scored, ranked leads with a suggested reply. The poster says it charges per scan and per qualified lead.
Ideas are curated from public posts and untested by us. Read the full note.