People on Reddit ask for recommendations and complain about problems all day long. A lot of them would be glad to find your product, if only they knew it existed. You can catch those conversations while they are still happening, but how you go about it matters, because Reddit comes down hard on anything that smells like a sales pitch.
F5Bot is a free service that watches Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites for the keywords you pick and emails you when one comes up. That makes it a decent tool for finding these conversations, as long as you are careful about what you do next.
Stop thinking about your brand for a minute. Someone who already knows your name is not the customer you are trying to find here. You want the person who has the problem you solve and has never heard of you.
So watch for the problem instead. If you make backup software, watch for phrases like "lost my files," "deleted my photos," or "no backup." If you sell a standing desk, watch for people talking about back pain at their desk. Think about the exact words someone would type at the moment they need what you make, and use those as your keywords.
When you give F5Bot a keyword, it emails you every time those words show up. That sounds great until you see how many people are venting rather than shopping. A phrase like "lost my files" catches the person hunting for a backup tool, but it also catches everyone just complaining about a bad day. You will want a way to narrow it down.
The filters on F5Bot's paid plans handle exactly this. An include filter says "only email me if the post also contains one of these words," so you can require a buying signal like "recommend" or "any suggestions." An exclude filter does the opposite, and throws out any match that contains a word you have marked as noise. Between the two, you can take a noisy problem keyword and cut it down to the posts actually worth your time.
F5Bot's AI-powered filtering on the top tiers is a good fit here, because "someone looking to buy" is easier to describe than to pin down with exact words. You could write something like "only show me people asking for a recommendation for backup software," and let it read each match and keep the ones that fit. You can read how the filters work in the documentation.
Go slow here. Do not drop a link and leave. Read the thread, answer the person's actual question like a normal human, and bring up your product only if it genuinely fits what they asked. Say that you work on it. Link to the specific page that helps them, not your homepage.
Check the subreddit's rules before you post, too. A lot of communities ban self-promotion outright, and some have a dedicated thread for it. Being a regular who is actually helpful goes over far better than showing up only to pitch.
This channel is slow and steady. A handful of good conversations a week is a real win. Do not try to automate the replies. It works because a real person showed up and was genuinely useful, and people can tell when that is missing.
F5Bot's free plan is enough to start watching for a problem keyword or two. Its limits are the delay before alerts go out, no monitoring of the most common keywords, and a daily cap on matches per keyword. Since problem keywords tend to be noisy, the paid plans help a lot here: they deliver in a timely manner, raise the caps, open up common keywords, and add the include, exclude, and AI-powered filters. Compare them on the pricing page.
Pick one problem your product solves, make a free account, and add the words people use to describe it. To watch for specific competitors and the people looking to leave them, see the competitor guide.