I stole my competitor's entire audience in one click
Hi IH,
I'm building https://achiv.com — you give it your URL, it figures out who your customers are, where they hang out on Reddit, and what they actually complain about to help you write a catchy content for Reddit. Real Reddit data, clustered, summarized into human-readable fears and needs per subreddit.
A few weeks ago I ran it on Achiv itself. The output was bad.
Instead of surfacing the obvious target — founders, marketers, growth people who want Reddit as a channel — it pointed me at general Reddit-user communities. Subs where people complain about karma, AutoMod, and downvotes as their daily problems.
Took me a while to see why. My landing page is written in Reddit-native vocabulary: karma, downvotes, AutoMod, subreddits. To my own tool, that language read as "audience = general Reddit users," not "audience = B2B marketers using Reddit as a channel." The tool was working correctly. My landing was lying about who I sell to.
Circular problem: the people who most need an ICP research tool are exactly the ones whose landing copy is ambiguous. If your copy were already clean, you wouldn't need the tool. If your copy is muddy, the tool can't see through it.
So I built a workaround — the Target Audience Cloner. You paste a competitor's URL, Achiv analyses their positioning instead of yours, then runs the full Reddit-wide research on their ICP. Skips your own messy copy entirely.
I tested it on Plausible Analytics — clean B2B positioning, zero ambiguity. The audience map came back with subs my own page never surfaced: r/SaaS, r/webdev, r/selfhosted, r/SEO. Same buyers as mine, just routed through someone with clearer copy.
The lesson I didn't expect: my own product is now a diagnostic for how broken my landing is. When the ICP tool gets it wrong, that's a marketing signal, not a bug.
Curious if anyone else has run into this — your own analytics or AI tool surfacing something uncomfortable about your own product. Also genuinely unsure on one thing: does "clone a competitor's audience" land as ethically fine, or does it make you twitch?
Launching on Product Hunt this Tuesday (after I cleanup my landing). Free tier stays open until then; after that it goes behind a paywall. Go try it achiv.com
How can I find customers that I am working on a app dream analysis and now I am going to make an mvp where can I test that
You can put an AppStore/PlayMarket page, make some poor landing etc. It needs to be connected with an actual website. You can even feed some article on medium, or here on IH describing your idea.
This tool solves a frequent and current problem, and it can greatly help us reach the customers we want. Congratulations! Can it be used with any URL from any website/app?
Yes, if this website is publicly reachable.
The sharpest thing in here is not the cloner, it is the realization that your own tool became a diagnostic for your broken landing copy. When your ICP tool gets your own ICP wrong, the tool is working and your positioning is the bug. I would build that into the product instead of treating it as an embarrassing side story. "Run it on yourself first and see if we read you the way your buyers do" is a stronger hook than the cloner.
On the ethics question, since you asked directly: the mechanic does not make me twitch, the word does. You are not stealing anything. Audiences are not owned, and reverse-engineering where buyers gather from public positioning is just market research with cleaner inputs. But "stole" and "clone" will scare off the careful B2B buyers you actually want and attract the spray-and-pray crowd you do not. I would reframe around borrowing a competitor's clarity, not their audience. Same feature, very different customer.
This lines up exactly with what I'm seeing in a niche right now. "Tech workers worried about RSU concentration" has 100 AI-generated articles that all read identically — diversify, talk to a CPA, 25% cap — and you can feel within a paragraph that nobody writing them has ever stared at a vesting screen at 70% concentration. The specific texture of the pain (which Reddit and Blind articulate beautifully) gets erased into a smooth surface.
One question on your 6 months of data: did the gap between Google ranking and LLM citation diverge for you? My hunch is LLMs are more forgiving of generic content because they synthesize across many sources, while Google increasingly punishes it — so the optimization targets might subtly diverge. Curious if your data backs that up or contradicts it.
That's really a helpful information. Thanks 👍
The sharpest thing here is the accidental insight: your tool reading your copy as "general Reddit users" is not a bug, it is your actual buyers reading you the exact same way. The cloner is a clever workaround, but it treats the symptom. The tool got confused because every visitor gets confused. Fix the landing and the tool stops needing the workaround.
You asked about the ethics, so a straight answer: cloning a competitor's audience does not make me twitch, because an ICP is not owned. You are analyzing public Reddit data about a public company's public positioning. That is just competitive research, and everyone serious already does it by hand. What makes me twitch is the framing. "I stole my competitor's entire audience in one click" is a great launch hook and a bad brand, especially for you. Your whole pitch is that you are the anti-slop, value-first alternative to Reddit spam tools. "Steal" is zero-sum and undercuts that in one word. For Product Hunt I would lead the feature as competitive ICP research, not theft. The hook earns clicks today and chips at the exact trust you are building. What does retention look like on the free tier so far, are people coming back to run a second product or is it one and done?
I understand, but the tool purpose is not to analyze your landing and help fix it. It's up to you. So this workaround is made to give people what they need.
I tried this one my own website and it's genuinely good. Good luck on your launch on PH!
Thanks! Have you tried to generate some posts?
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