Vertical-tuned Reddit intent monitor — finds, scores, and drafts replies to buyer-intent posts in your exact niche, not generic brand mentions.
Problem
Indie SaaS founders spend 2-3 hours/day manually scrolling Reddit looking for high-intent posts ('is there a tool for X?', 'alternative to Y?') in their category, miss threads that go stale within hours, and lose customers to whoever replies first. Horizontal monitoring tools (Brand24, $50+/mo) are overkill and produce noisy signals because they don't understand vertical-specific buying language.
Audience
Solo SaaS founders and growth marketers in dev-tools, B2B-SaaS, and creator-tools verticals running products at $1K-$20K MRR; 5-50K addressable per vertical via r/SaaS, r/microsaas, r/devtools, r/Entrepreneur.
Reasoning
What we ship
**Core features (MVP)**
- Vertical-pick onboarding: user chooses their niche (dev-tools / B2B-SaaS / creator-tools) on signup, and a tuned scoring prompt + curated subreddit list loads automatically.
- Real-time intent monitor dashboard: feed of posts with buyer-intent score 0-100, color-coded chips, filters by subreddit / recency / score threshold.
- Niche-tuned scoring slider: dial in what counts as "buyer-intent" for your niche (e.g. "looking for X" + "alternative to Y" weight high).
- AI reply drafts: one click and Claude writes a helpful-founder-style reply with a soft mention of your product.
- Alert delivery: email + Slack webhook + Discord webhook, per-niche thresholds.
**Primary user flow**
1. Founder finds us via an r/SaaS thread or ProductHunt; starts the 14-day trial.
2. On onboarding picks their vertical (dev-tools), connects Reddit OAuth (their own quota), adds 5-10 subreddits.
3. Within 30 minutes gets first scored feed: 12 posts, 3 with intent-score >80; clicks "Draft reply" — Claude writes a reply mentioning their product.
4. Posts the reply straight from the dashboard; lands first paying customer in week 1, upgrades to $29/mo Solo.
**What it looks like**
- **Landing page**: hero "Stop scrolling Reddit. Start replying first." Left column — live posts with pulsing score chips; right column — sample AI draft. CTA: "Pick your niche — start free".
- **Main app screen**: split-view dashboard. Left rail — filters (vertical, subreddits, score slider 0-100, recency). Center — feed of cards: post title, subreddit, score chip (red 80+, amber 50-80), excerpt, "Draft reply" + "Open in Reddit" buttons. Right drawer — generated drafts and reply history.
- **Output format**: Slack/Discord notification reads "[devtools] r/devtools • intent 87 • 'looking for postman alternative' [open] [draft]"; daily email digest with Top 10 of the day.
**MVP build plan (9 days)**
- Day 1-2: FastAPI + Postgres + Celery (Redis) on Railway, JWT auth, Stripe Subscriptions wired.
- Day 3-4: Reddit OAuth + PRAW polling worker, per-user quotas, rate-limit backoff with 429 handling.
- Day 5: Claude Sonnet 4.6 intent-scoring prompt (vertical-tuned for dev-tools first), scoring API.
- Day 6: React + Tailwind dashboard, vertical-pick onboarding, scored feed, scoring-tune slider.
- Day 7: Reply-draft pipeline (Claude + user's historical tweets/replies for voice match).
- Day 8: Email/Slack/Discord delivery, landing page on Cloudflare Pages, pricing page.
- Day 9: ToS + bot-policy page, ProductHunt assets, Stripe webhooks tested, ship.
Source signals
- **SIG-20260425-us-micro-saas-utility-reddit-buying-intent-monitor**: "monitoring Reddit all day... I used to search keywords manually and still missed good posts" — 5+ launches in 4 months
- **SIG-20260425-us-micro-saas-utility-no-code-glue-overhead** (adjacent): solo founders' day eaten by manual ops/coordination — Reddit monitoring is one such manual loop
Reasoning
The Reddit buying-intent space has 5+ documented launches in the last 4 months (RedditGrow, leadlim @ $4K MRR, Subreddit Signals, Niche Miner, trafficscout) — proving both pain and WTP. Existing tools fall on a horizontal-scoring axis: they flag any keyword match, leaving founders to manually filter signal from noise. The white-space is **vertical-tuned intent scoring** — Claude understands that "looking for an alternative to Postman" in r/devtools is a hot buyer signal, while the same phrase in r/casualconversation is not. Stack fits Railway + Cloudflare Pages cleanly: Reddit API (PRAW) polls subreddits, Celery enqueues posts, Claude scores them, Postgres stores alerts, FastAPI serves the dashboard, Stripe handles subscriptions. Build window 9 days for one vertical. Recurring revenue is durable because the alert stream is a passive growth channel founders won't cancel while running their SaaS.
Quick competitive read
- **F5Bot** (free + paid) — solo-built since 2018, 175K alerts/day. The free baseline; we sit a tier above with vertical scoring + drafts
- **RedditGrow** ($19.99 Starter / $79.99 Growth) — horizontal scoring, no vertical tuning
- **GummySearch** ($29 / $59 / $199) — audience-research, shutting down 2026 → migration window
- **ReplyAgent.ai** ($3/posted comment) — outcome-based outsourced execution; complementary, not direct
- **Brand24** ($50+/mo enterprise-leaning) — too noisy at niche scale
Market density: **medium-high (5+ players)** but every existing player is either generic-horizontal, free-keyword-baseline, or outsourced-execution. Nobody owns **vertical-tuned + self-serve + reply-ready**. White-space confirmed — dev-tools first, then B2B-SaaS, then creator-tools. GummySearch's shutdown is an unexpected migration gift; capture their power-users in Q1.
Initial pricing hypothesis
$29/mo Solo (1 niche, 50 alerts/day) → $59/mo Pro (3 niches, 200 alerts/day, AI reply drafts) → $129/mo Team (multi-seat, Slack/Discord delivery). Anchored on developed-tier WTP $10-100/mo solo and validated price point from RedditGrow.
Distribution hypothesis
Three-wave distribution:
1. **Build-in-public on X/Twitter** (#buildinpublic, indie-hackers with 1-10K followers)
2. **Reddit organic** — each scored alert is a chance to reply helpfully + soft-mention the product (dogfooding)
3. **ProductHunt launch** + crosspost to r/SaaS, r/microsaas, r/devtools after first 50 paying customers