Customers on Reddit do not search for your product. They describe a problem, ask what other people use, or complain about the tool they have. Finding them is a matter of searching for those shapes of sentence, in the subreddits where your buyers already talk, and then being ruthless about which threads are actually asking for something.
Where buyers are
Not usually in the subreddit about your category. r/SaaS is full of founders, not buyers. Buyers are in the subreddit about their job: r/sysadmin, r/smallbusiness, r/ecommerce, r/marketing, r/webdev, r/accounting. Start from who buys, then list the three to six subreddits where that person asks for help.
The phrases that mean intent
Search each subreddit for the sentence shapes people use when they need a tool:
- "what do you use for"
- "alternative to"
- "recommend a"
- "is there a tool that"
- "how do you handle"
- "switching from"
Combine those with the problem, not the product name. "what do you use for onboarding emails" finds buyers; "email onboarding software" finds vendors.
Telling a lead from a coincidence
Most threads that match are not leads. A rule that works: score the thread on whether the person is asking for a solution now, whether your product is honestly a good answer, and whether a practitioner's reply would land in that community. A rant with your keyword in it is a zero. A thread with sixty answers already is nearly a zero. Someone asking "is there a tool that does X without the enterprise sales call" when that is exactly your product is an eighty.
Be strict. Replying to a five is how the ratio goes bad.
What to do with a lead
Answer the actual question first, fully. If your product is the honest answer, say so once, with a disclosure and a limitation. If it is not, answer anyway; that is the ninety percent that makes the ten percent work.
Time
Doing this by hand takes an hour a day across six subreddits, which is why founders stop after a week. The searching and scoring is the part worth automating; the judgement about what to say is the part worth keeping. That split is how Gorilla Desk is built: it reads and scores, you swipe.