What buyer intent means
Finding people who are describing the problem you solve, asking for a recommendation, or comparing named products — usually without mentioning your brand at all.
Reddit · Buyer intent
Monitor Reddit for buyer intent
Find Reddit threads where someone is describing the problem you solve or asking for a recommendation — usually without naming a single product.
[01] THE JOB/ BUYER INTENT
What it looks like on Reddit
Reddit is the best buyer-intent source in existence and it is barely contested, because the highest-value posts contain no brand name for anyone to be watching. The shape is always the same: a description of a situation, a constraint, and a question. "Two of us, 400 emails a day, and I am the bottleneck — is there anything that handles a shared inbox without a full helpdesk?" There is no product in that sentence, so the only people who find it are the ones watching the problem rather than the name. Subreddit context matters as much as the words: the same question in r/smallbusiness and r/sysadmin is two different buyers with two different budgets.
What Reddit will not give you
Reddit is strict about self-promotion, and the accounts that get banned are the ones that post automatically from a pool. FishOut drafts a reply and stops — you send it from your own account, disclosing who you are.
What FishOut collects from Reddit
Posts and comments across public subreddits, with the subreddit name and the author’s public handle attached.
[02] WHAT TO TRACK/ KEYWORDS
Keyword shapes for buyer intent on Reddit
A keyword tuned for this job on another platform is usually silent here, because the same person writes differently in each place. The example beneath is read the way FishOut reads one: a relevance bar and the label it would carry.
keywords · reddit
the problem in the user’s words
Not your category name. People do not write "shared inbox software", they write "email is a bottleneck" and "we keep replying twice". Watch the symptom, not the solution.
recommendation phrasings
"is there anything that", "what do you use for", "looking for a tool that". These are the exact strings that precede a purchase decision, and they cost nothing to watch.
competitor name plus a complaint word
"too expensive", "cancelled", "switching from". Reddit is where people justify a switch to strangers, and the justification tells you what to say.
r/smallbusiness96Two of us, 400 emails a day, and I am the bottleneck. Is there anything that actually handles a shared inbox without a full helpdesk?
Asking for recommendations[03] HOW TO SET IT UP/ VIEWS & ROUTING
The configuration that works here
Work it from two built-in views: Leads, which collects posts labelled Asking for recommendations, Comparison or Has a problem on your topic and competitor keywords, and Reply now, which on Reddit is driven by the Reply call. For alerts, put a relevance floor of 85 on a channel a human watches. Reddit rewards a specific, disclosed, genuinely useful answer and punishes anything that reads like marketing — a downvoted brand reply is worse than silence, and it is permanent. FishOut drafts in your Voice and checks the draft says who you are; it never posts, so sending is yours.
And what to do with what arrives
A reply, from a human, in the thread, while it is still live. Work it from the Leads and Reply now views, draft in your Voice, assign to a person — FishOut never posts.
[04] THE COMMON MISTAKE/ AVOID THIS
Adding your brand name and stopping there
The brand keyword produces the most volume and the least new business, so it feels like the tool is working while the valuable threads go past unwatched. On Reddit specifically, the posts worth answering rarely name any product — that is why nobody else has found them, and it is why a watch list without problem phrases will quietly underperform for months before anyone questions it.
Questions
Run it from your assistant: Daily buyer-intent digest, Top 5 posts to reply to today, Reply on Reddit without getting banned.
Other jobs on Reddit
Buyer intent on other platforms
LinkedIn
YouTube
Bluesky24 of a possible 40. A job and a platform only make a page when the intersection has something true of it alone.