Using Reddit for Lead Gen Without Becoming 'That Person'

Most founders I know have the same Reddit story.

They hear that "Reddit is full of buyers." They open a few tabs. r/SaaS, r/startups, maybe a niche subreddit that feels promising. They scroll for an hour, save a few posts, fire off a couple of replies trying to be helpful. One even turns into a DM. Then… nothing. No follow-up. No clear signal it worked. Just a vague sense of "maybe this matters?"

Reddit doesn't fail because there aren't leads there. It fails because it punishes lazy intent detection harder than any other platform. If you treat it like Twitter search or LinkedIn prospecting, you'll get ignored—or worse, banned. But if you treat it like a live map of problems, not people, it can quietly outperform a lot of louder channels.

The trick is understanding what Reddit is actually good for, and what it's terrible at.

Reddit isn't a list of prospects. It's a list of situations.

The biggest mistake is opening Reddit with the question: "Who can I sell to?"

That question makes you skim for job titles, founder flairs, or people explicitly asking for tools. Those exist, but they're the tip of the iceberg. And they're usually swarmed by comments within minutes.

The more useful question is: "What situation keeps showing up that my product actually fits?"

On Reddit, people don't describe themselves as buyers. They describe their week. They say things like:

"I'm spending way too much time replying to cold emails that go nowhere." "We tried X tool and it kind of worked, but setup was a nightmare." "I don't even know if this problem is worth fixing or if it's just me."

Those aren't leads in the CRM sense. They're context. And context is what makes Reddit valuable.

I've seen founders waste months replying to "Any recommendations?" threads while ignoring posts with five comments and zero upvotes where someone is clearly stuck, frustrated, and open to changing how they work. Those low-visibility posts are where real intent hides.

Why "being helpful" still doesn't work most of the time

Everyone gives the same advice: "Just be helpful. Don't sell."

That's directionally right, but incomplete. Plenty of founders are genuinely helpful on Reddit and still get nothing out of it. Not because Reddit hates them, but because their help isn't anchored to a real next step.

Imagine this scenario.

You see a post: someone complaining about manually tracking competitor mentions across Reddit and Twitter. You reply with a thoughtful paragraph explaining how to set up Google Alerts, a couple of saved searches, maybe a spreadsheet. The OP thanks you. End of interaction.

You were helpful. You also trained them to keep doing the thing that frustrates them.

Now imagine a slightly different response. You still explain the workaround, but you add one line: "This usually breaks once volume increases. That's the point where I realized I needed something that showed patterns, not just mentions."

You didn't pitch. You didn't link. You didn't DM. But you reframed the problem. That's the difference.

Reddit rewards people who help others think more clearly about their situation, not just solve today's task.

The real signal on Reddit isn't keywords. It's repetition.

Most people use Reddit search like a blunt instrument. They search for a keyword, sort by "new," and skim. That's fine for one-off outreach. It's terrible for pattern recognition.

The useful signal is seeing the same problem phrased five different ways across different subreddits over a few weeks.

One founder I worked with kept seeing variations of the same complaint: "We get traffic from communities, but it never converts." Different products. Different audiences. Same underlying confusion about intent.

That's when Reddit stopped being a lead source and started being a positioning tool. They rewrote their landing page based on those threads. Outreach got easier because the words already matched how people described the pain.

If you only look for explicit buying intent, you miss this entirely.

Mini-scenario: the quiet thread that matters more than the loud one

Here's a real pattern you'll recognize if you spend enough time on Reddit.

Thread A: "What's the best tool for X?" 200 upvotes. 80 comments. Everyone is pitching. The OP disappears.

Thread B: "I've tried three different ways to do X and none of them stick." 6 upvotes. 12 comments. The OP replies to almost everyone.

Thread A feels like a gold mine. Thread B feels small.

Thread B is where you learn how people actually evaluate solutions. What they tried. What broke. What they're afraid of repeating. That's where a thoughtful reply can turn into a DM two days later, not because you asked for it, but because you were the only person who seemed to get it.

Reddit lead gen works better when you stop chasing attention and start chasing understanding.

Why DMs are the wrong first move (most of the time)

Founders often ask: "When should I DM someone?"

The uncomfortable answer: later than you think.

On Reddit, DMs without context feel invasive. Even if your product is a perfect fit, a cold DM after one comment reads as transactional. People didn't come to Reddit to be prospected.

The better pattern is slow familiarity. You reply in-thread. You show up again a week later in a different discussion. Your name becomes mildly recognizable in that niche. Then, if someone DMs you first, the conversation is completely different.

There's also a selfish reason to delay DMs: you learn more by staying public. Watching how others react to your framing teaches you what resonates and what doesn't. A private conversation hides that feedback.

Reddit scales poorly if you treat it like outreach—and that's okay

If you're looking for something you can scale with automation, Reddit will disappoint you. You can't blast messages. You can't template replies. And if you try, the community will shut you down fast.

But Reddit scales in a different way. It compounds understanding.

Every week you spend reading and responding gives you better intuition about: – which problems are chronic vs. momentary – which alternatives people already distrust – which words trigger skepticism immediately

That insight spills into everything else: your homepage, your cold emails, even which features you build next.

Some founders use a tool like Kynvo here—not to auto-post or scrape emails, but to track recurring problems and conversation patterns across communities without manually opening 15 tabs. The value isn't speed. It's memory. You stop relying on gut feel and start seeing trends.

Mini-scenario: when Reddit tells you not to chase a lead

This one hurts, but it saves time.

You see a thread that looks perfect. The pain matches your product exactly. You jump in. The replies start coming. But something feels off. People keep saying, "This is annoying, but we'll probably just live with it."

That's Reddit telling you the problem exists, but the urgency doesn't.

Without Reddit, you might have built a whole outbound campaign around that pain. With Reddit, you learn early that it's a "complaint problem," not a "budget problem." That's not a failure. That's saved effort.

Good lead gen isn't just finding people who could buy. It's filtering out the ones who won't.

The mental shift that makes Reddit work

If you take one thing from this, make it this:

Reddit is not where you extract leads. It's where you earn the right to have better conversations elsewhere.

When founders say "Reddit doesn't work," what they usually mean is "Reddit didn't give me a clean attribution link." That's fair—but also missing the point.

Reddit sharpens your sense of what's real. It shows you how messy buying decisions actually are. It forces you to slow down and listen in a way most channels don't.

Used badly, it's a time sink. Used well, it becomes a quiet edge—one that doesn't look impressive in a dashboard, but shows up in how often the right people say, "This is exactly what I was dealing with."

That's not flashy lead gen. But it's the kind that lasts.