Somewhere on Reddit right now, someone is describing the exact problem your product solves and asking if anything fixes it. Here's how to actually find that post.
Reddit is the single best free source of buying-intent leads for an early-stage product, and almost nobody uses it right. Most founders either ignore it completely or post one "check out my product" thread that gets removed in ten minutes. What works is treating it like a search problem, not a marketing problem.
There are two kinds of posts worth your time. Active demand — someone directly asking "what tool do you use for X" — is rare and goes stale fast, usually within an hour or two, because someone else answers first. Passive demand — complaints like "I hate how long this takes" or "why is there no good tool for this" — is far more common, and the person hasn't started looking yet, so you're not competing with five other replies.
Start with the two or three subreddits most specific to your niche, not the biggest general one. A tiny, focused subreddit with 8,000 members who all have your exact problem beats a 2-million-member general subreddit where your problem is 1% of the conversation. Search the subreddit directly using terms like "recommend," "alternative to," and "is there a tool" rather than scrolling the feed and hoping.
Pull new posts from your target subreddits, check each one for buying-intent language, flag the ones worth a reply, ignore the rest. Doing this by hand for even three subreddits takes two to three hours a day if you're thorough — which is exactly why most people give up after a week. This loop, run automatically, is the entire reason Kairo exists.
See exactly what Kairo would flag in your subreddits, right now.
Run a free scan →A lot of subreddits explicitly ban self-promotion, and the wider Reddit community is fast to downvote anything that smells like an ad.
Someone posts: "I hate manually searching Reddit for leads every day, feels like a waste of time."
Answer the actual question first. Mention your product second, and only if it's genuinely the answer. If a subreddit's rules ban vendor replies outright, don't reply at all — build karma there instead by being a normal, helpful member, and save product mentions for subreddits that allow them.
Active demand needs speed and directness — they're already shopping, so answer plainly and let the product speak for itself. Passive demand needs empathy first. They don't know a solution exists yet, so leading with a pitch reads as tone-deaf. Validate the frustration, then mention what you built almost as an aside.
Don't expect your first reply to convert. Here's roughly what the first month actually looks like:
Stop searching Reddit by hand. Let Kairo find the thread worth replying to.
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