Stop asking “How do I get users?”

This reframing is spot on. I've been on the other side, building first, then scrambling for users. The "where are they already complaining" approach changes everything.

Curious: for a forex trading community, do you see these intent signals more in real time chat (Discord/Telegram) or async forums (Reddit/Indie Hackers)? Testing both for a Telegram growth play and the velocity feels totally different.

Running live experiments on this, if anyone's grinding on trading product growth, I'm sharing funnel teardowns and backtests here @US30EliteFX on telegram.

This reframing is exactly right. I had the same experience building a compliance tool — my first users came from people literally posting 'does anyone know how to prepare for EU AI Act?' on LinkedIn. I wasn't selling, I was just answering an existing question. The demand signal was already there, I just wasn't looking in the right place.

This is a really solid point. A lot of founders focus on traffic first instead of existing conversations. In many cases the demand is already visible in communities like forums, Reddit, or niche groups people are literally asking for solutions.

I’ve noticed that when you reply to someone who’s already describing the exact problem, the interaction feels much more natural compared to cold outreach or ads. It becomes a conversation instead of a pitch.

One thing that helped me was searching for problem-based queries like “tool for ”, “alternative to ”, or “how do you solve ” across different communities. You’d be surprised how many posts already exist where people are actively l

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This is exactly how I found the cohort dropout problem. Searched for "students disappearing mid-course" and found organizers describing the same pattern everywhere - someone goes quiet around week 3, by the time you notice they're already gone.
The live demand signal was there. The problem nobody had solved: dropout costs nothing. No record, no consequence. That's what I'm building around.

This really hits — especially the part about “live demand signals.”

I started noticing the same thing, but around a slightly different problem. A lot of creators aren’t just asking how to make content, they’re constantly asking how to manage publishing across platforms without doing everything manually.

You’ll see posts like:

“How do you upload to TikTok, YouTube, Instagram without repeating the same steps?”

“Is there a tool to post videos everywhere at once?”

That’s actually what led me to build VidShare — not from guessing, but from seeing those exact conversations happen over and over.

Feels like what you’re doing with LeadSynth is solving the discovery side of the problem, and tools like VidShare sit on the execution side once you know there’s demand.

Curious — have you seen a lot of creator workflow or cross-posting related queries come through your system?

this reframing is huge and it applies to paid channels too. the exact language people use when complaining about a problem is basically your first ad creative - if your meta or google copy doesn't match how people actually describe their pain, you get inflated CPCs and low CVRs no matter how good the targeting is. the community listening you're describing is really just free customer research that makes everything downstream cheaper. what communities did you find most signal-rich when first figuring out positioning for LeadSynth?

Thanks sharing such an insightful post. You inspired me more.

Still when you find these posts and try to answer with your solution, it feels like advertising

Honestly this reframes something I'd been thinking about wrong for a while. I always assumed you needed to 'build an audience' first before anyone would care, but searching for existing conversations makes more sense than trying to manufacture new ones.

The part about writing down the exact sentence your customer would say is deceptively simple — harder to do well than it sounds though. You can easily fool yourself into writing what you think they'd say versus what they actually type into a search bar at 11pm frustrated.

Curious how you handle the volume side of this — like once you find those communities, are you manually responding to every relevant post or is there some triage involved? Would imagine that gets noisy fast depending on the space you're in.

This is great, but if you have a tool that can spot these market desires, shouldn't you just pounce on those instead of offering a tool for others?

There’s definitely a lot of truth in this, but I think the real shift happens when founders stop thinking about “finding users” and start thinking about mapping where the problem already lives online. Most problems that are painful enough to build a product around are already being discussed somewhere forums, niche Slack groups, Reddit threads, Discord servers, or places like Indie Hackers. The key isn’t just searching for “people asking for a tool”, it’s identifying the language patterns people use when they’re frustrated. Sentences like “this is so manual”, “there has to be a better way”, or “I’m switching away from X” are often stronger signals than direct “tool recommendation” questions.

Another thing that’s interesting is that these conversations often reveal why existing solutions fail, which is even more valuable than demand itself. When someone asks for alternatives, they usually explain what’s broken: price, complexity, missing features, bad UX, etc. That’s essentially free product research happening in public. If you consistently observe those discussions, you’re not just finding users you’re learning how to position your product so it fits the narrative people already have in their heads. At that point outreach doesn’t feel like marketing anymore, it just feels like continuing a conversation that was already happening.

This is a clever approach. Makes more sense to look for people already talking about the problem rather than sending a load of cold emails into the void..

I’m working on a small project in the plant world around tissue culture and rare aroids, and the communities there are tiny but very active and engaged. Being in the right conversation at the right time is half the battle.

Out of interest, which platform tends to produce the best leads? Cheers.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do while building GRYND.

I'm creating a productivity app that turns focus sessions into a game.

I'm currently looking for communities where people struggle with focus and motivation.

A lot of SaaS teams treat growth as a distribution problem when the real issue is understanding how customers describe the problem in the first place. Communities and search surface that language directly.
If you pay attention to it, you can structure marketing around the actual decisions buyers are trying to make.

This is super useful. I’ve been looking to create products and then hit a hurdle where I don’t know how to pitch my idea to potential users. What I’ve also come across is the idea of engaging in conversations while building the product too. As I can iterate and develop the product according to the market needs

I´m seeing the same thing while building a nieche tool for import risk in international trade.
Most useful insights actually come from reading logistics and supply chain discussions where people complain about documentation, HS codes, or incoterms.
Those conversations arre much more valuable than trying to guess a target audience.

Instead of beeing competitors a lot of us should support each other, give feedback, stars, test and break tools to help improve each other...

This is a great point.
I’ve noticed the same thing when looking for product ideas — people are constantly asking questions in communities, but founders often ignore those signals.
Replying to someone already looking for a solution feels much more natural than trying to convince someone they have a problem.