For Developer-tool companies · Devtools and infrastructure

Social listening for developer tools — FishOut

Developer audiences are the easiest to listen to and the hardest to reply to. They are in public, in writing, and technical enough to be specific — and they will notice immediately if the reply reads like marketing.

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[01] THE JOB/ DEVELOPER-TOOL COMPANIES

What developer-tool companies are actually trying to do

The work here is routing, not discovery. A bug report, a "what should I use instead" thread and a conference talk mentioning you are three different jobs for three different people, and the thing that fails is all three landing in one channel that engineering mutes in week two.
[02] WHERE TO LOOK/ PLATFORMS

GitHub

Issues and discussions on other people’s repositories — where your tool gets named as a dependency, a workaround or a thing that broke. Almost nobody watching a brand watches GitHub, and it is where the most actionable complaints are.
How FishOut monitors GitHub →

Hacker News

The launch thread, the outage thread and the "why we moved off X" post. Low volume, extremely high consequence, and a comment made six hours late is a comment nobody reads.
How FishOut monitors Hacker News →

Reddit

Where the alternatives-to question gets asked, in subreddits specific enough that a good answer is welcome and a bad one is downvoted into memory.
How FishOut monitors Reddit →

Medium

Long-form comparisons and migration write-ups. Slow-moving, but a post that ranks becomes the thing every prospect reads before they talk to you.
How FishOut monitors Medium →
[03] WHAT TO TRACK/ KEYWORDS

Four keyword shapes that work here

A keyword is a search FishOut runs continuously across every platform you have enabled — a Brand, Competitor or Topic keyword, with an optional Means… line and filters that apply before any AI reads a post. The shapes below are ordered by how much they tend to be worth, which is almost the reverse of the order people add them in — a brand name is the first one everybody adds and the smallest source of anything new.
keywords · developer-tools
your package or CLI name

A Brand keyword for the exact string people type, not your company name. On GitHub and Hacker News these differ more often than you would expect, and the package name is the one that appears in a stack trace.

alternative to <you>

Churn signal, and the one worth waking someone for. Catch it while the thread is live and you get a reply in; catch it a week later and you get a post-mortem.

error strings and symptoms

The specific message your tool emits when it fails. Nobody else can watch this keyword, because nobody else knows the string — and it finds the bug reports that never became issues.

competitor names

Competitor keywords, not to argue with. A thread comparing two other tools is a thread where a third option is a genuinely useful comment, provided you are early and honest.

[04] HOW TO SET IT UP/ VIEWS AND AGENTS

The setup that survives a busy month

An agent is a rule you write: when a post matches conditions on relevance, label, Reply call, sentiment, keyword or platform, then label it, assign it, notify a channel or draft a reply. None ship pre-built. The one below is the one worth writing first for this job, and it takes about a minute.
1

Write the Brief like a README

Say what the tool does, which stack it is for, and what to ignore — the unrelated library with the same name, job posts, tutorials you did not write. Every post is read against it, and the ones that mean something else go to Filtered with the reason Different meaning.

2

Split the channels before you split the team

Bugs to an engineering channel with no reply drafted; buying signals to a sales or founder channel. In the inbox the built-in Support view (brand keyword plus Question, Complaint or Has a problem) and Leads view already keep them apart; an agent does the same for alerts. The same mention going to both channels is how one of them dies.

3

Send bugs somewhere engineering already is

A Discord channel or a signed webhook into your own tracker, not an email nobody owns. The webhook payload carries the relevance, labels, sentiment and Reply call, so your systems can route on what a post is rather than only on a number. Give engineering a lower relevance floor than sales: a vaguely-worded bug report is still a bug report.

4

Describe the labels only you need

The nine built-in labels cover the general cases. Plus adds three you describe in a sentence — "Install problem: someone cannot get the package installed or configured" — and the AI applies them from then on. Mark Not for us or Relevant after all when it gets one wrong; your recent corrections go into its next reads.

agent · bug router

When a post on a brand keyword is labelled Has a problem or Complaint

Then assign it to the on-call engineer and send it to the engineering webhook — with no reply drafted, because engineering should not be answering in your brand voice

[05] WHEN WE ARE THE WRONG ANSWER/ HONESTLY

Octolens may suit you better

Octolens is built specifically for B2B developer tools and covers more sources than we do. If breadth of source is the deciding factor and $159/mo is comfortable, look at it properly before you look at us — the honest comparison is that we cover ten platforms with AI triage and an MCP server on every plan and agents from $19, and they cover more platforms for more money.
Read the full FishOut vs Octolens comparison →

What this costs. GitHub and Hacker News are checked hourly on every plan, Free included, with AI triage on every post. Plus at $19/mo adds 50 keywords, agents, reply drafts and 5 keywords checked every 15 minutes on Hacker News; Pro at $49/mo makes that 50. The REST API, MCP server and webhooks are on every plan.

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