Built a tool to find customers on Reddit. 11 months later, I'm surrounded by 100 competitors

Eleven months ago, I launched a product to help people find potential customers online, mainly through Reddit.

At the time, there were only two other tools I knew of doing something similar. One had launched a few months before, and the other launched the same week as mine.

The first version was simple. It tracked keyword mentions on Reddit, analyzed the posts, and if it found something relevant, it would leave a natural, subtle reply promoting the user’s product.

I launched it on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and Reddit. That brought in 500+ users and a lot of feedback.

As expected, Reddit didn’t love the auto-replies. So I talked to users and adjusted. Now the product surfaces relevant posts, and users leave their replies manually (except a few). That change actually improved the experience for everyone.

One day I got lucky and the product was featured in a newspaper. That brought thousands of visitors in a single day and a few new customers. Overall, a solid start.

At some point I shared a post about my revenue. Not sure if it was a coincidence, but right after that I started seeing competitors show up almost every week.

Now the niche is full. There are probably close to 100 similar products out there. I track a few of them out of curiosity. Most haven’t updated in a while, which either means they’re profitable or already abandoned?

Meanwhile, I kept building.

Keyword tracking by itself isn’t hard. You can use a free tool like F5bot to get alerts when certain keywords appear on Reddit. It works, but you're stuck reviewing every single mention manually, most of which aren't relevant. It takes time, and there's a lot of noise.

That’s why I focused heavily on relevance checking. The tool scrapes posts using your keywords and runs analysis to figure out which ones are actually worth your time. Instead of dumping every result, it filters the noise and highlights only the ones that matter.

This is the part I’ve spent the most time building. It doesn’t just look for keywords. It tries to understand the context of each post, detect the user’s intent, and figure out if they’re likely to be in a buying mindset. If yes, it also tries to estimate how strong that intent is.

Based on that, the tool can surface posts where people are most likely to convert or engage meaningfully. It also collects high-intent leads so users can follow up directly if they want.

This is what most people end up paying for. Not just to track mentions, but to focus only on the real opportunities.

Some competitors might build the same thing after reading this. That’s fine. My users will keep telling me what to do next.

Happy to answer any questions. And if you're building something in a niche that's getting crowded, I’d love to hear how you're handling it.

If you're curious about the product itself, it's here: https://replyhub.co

Would also love feedback on how you'd improve something like this, always trying to make it more useful.