The exhausting cycle of manual community outreach
I've been spending 3-4 hours daily scrolling through Reddit and Hacker News looking for conversations where my product might actually help someone. Most days I find absolutely nothing worth engaging with, and when I do find something relevant, I spend another 30 minutes crafting a response that doesn't sound like spam.
The worst part? I'll stumble across a perfect conversation from 2 days ago where someone was literally asking for exactly what I built, but now it's buried and no one will see my reply. I've started setting calendar reminders to check the same subreddits multiple times a day, which feels completely unsustainable.
I'm starting to think about building something to automate the discovery part of this process, but honestly I'm not sure if this is just my own neurosis or if other founders are burning this much time on manual outreach.
How many hours are you spending each week hunting for relevant conversations in communities? And when you do find them, how often do you actually get meaningful engagement versus crickets?
That 3-4 hour daily scroll is the ultimate founder time-sink. It’s frustrating to find the perfect thread only to realize you’re 48 hours too late for the algorithm to care. Building a discovery tool sounds like a classic "scratch your own itch" pivot that many founders would actually pay for.
Since you're considering turning this problem into a product, there’s a competition where you can submit the idea—entry is $19 and the winner gets a Tokyo trip.
Also, the prize pool just opened at $0. Your odds are the best right now.
Would your discovery tool just flag keywords, or are you thinking of using AI to rank how "convertible" a specific Reddit or HN thread actually is?
You’re not imagining it — this is exactly the trap most of us hit.
What worked better for me is changing the process from “hunt manually” to a tiny repeatable scoring loop:
That usually cuts wasted scanning time a lot and improves reply quality because you’re not forcing weak-fit threads.
If useful, I put together a $1 teardown flow that uses this exact triage logic (plus there’s a free no-payment preview): https://roastmysite.io/go.php?src=external_manual_ih_manual-community-outreach_usd_presell_hv
That scoring framework is brilliant! I never thought about quantifying the opportunity like that. The "pain clarity" metric especially makes sense because I've definitely wasted time on vague complaints that don't actually indicate someone ready to buy.
The 12-hour cutoff is something I need to implement immediately. I keep telling myself "maybe someone will still see it" but you're right that timing is everything in these communities. Thanks for sharing the specific scoring criteria!