u/mentiondesk

I launched to nobody. No mailing list, no following, no budget for ads. I tried one round of cold email, felt like a telemarketer doing it, and converted about as well as one.

What I did have was a search box. People were already asking for what we had built, in public, in threads. More of them than I expected. They just had no idea we existed.

The method was boring. I wrote down the questions a buyer in our category would actually type: best tool for X, alternative to (competitor), how do you handle Y. I searched each one on Reddit sorted by new, then again on Google with site:reddit.com to catch the older threads that already rank. Quora and Hacker News got the same treatment. Everything else I ignored.

My rules were simple. Reply only where the question was a genuine fit. Answer the whole thing first, properly, including the parts that had nothing to do with us. Name the other options honestly, including the ones that were a better call for that person. Mention ours as one option, with the case where it fits and the case where it does not. Never post a link.

The first customer came from a reply a few weeks in. After that a slow trickle. Two came from one old thread that ranks on Google and still sends somebody every few months, which was the only part of this that compounded on its own.

Being honest about the scale: that is ten customers over a few months, not a growth hack. Most replies did nothing. Maybe one in five produced anything I could measure, and the rest were just me being helpful on the internet, which is fine but does not pay rent.

Timing mattered more than anything else I changed. Replies I got in within a couple of hours did far better than the same reply a day later, because by then the thread had its answers and nobody came back to read mine. And checking every platform every day for the few questions worth answering is the part that nearly made me quit. Most of what I read was noise.

So I automate the monitoring now. I use ParseStream, but use whatever tool you like, just make sure it has AI filtering or you will spend the day reading junk.

This scales badly past a point. At the first customers stage it is still the best zero budget channel I know of.

Most GEO advice I read is about restructuring your site so a model can parse it. Fine. But go and ask ChatGPT or Google a real buying question in your category and look at what it actually cites. A lot of the time it is a Reddit thread, a Hacker News comment, or a Quora answer.

That makes sense once you think about what those answers need: first hand experience, comparisons between real options, and opinions that are current. Forums have all three, marketing pages have none of them. Google also licenses Reddit data, and in the citation studies people keep sharing, Reddit and Quora sit near the top of the most cited domains. I will skip the figures because they move every quarter, but the direction has been steady for a while.

So the practical play for a small brand is not producing more AI optimized content. It is being the comment inside the thread the model is already reading.

Finding those threads takes an afternoon. Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask: best tool for X, X vs Y, what do people actually use for X. Read the citations. Run the same searches in Google and see what the AI Overview links to. The same handful of threads will come up repeatedly. Those are the pages doing the work in your category.

Then read what actually got quoted. It is rarely the original post. It is usually the top voted comment, and it is specific: somebody who has clearly used the things, names three or four options, says what each is good and bad at, and answers the exact question. Nobody quotes "great tool, highly recommend".

Becoming that comment is not complicated. Get to fresh threads on those questions early, because early comments collect the votes that put them on top. Be the most useful answer there. Name alternatives honestly, mention yours as one option, and say plainly where it fits and where it does not. Keep it link free.

The catch is timing. The threads cited next year are being created this week, and you cannot watch every buyer question across Reddit, Hacker News and Quora by hand every day. Most of what you would wade through is noise anyway.

So I automate the monitoring. I use ParseStream, but use whatever tool you like. Just make sure it has AI filtering, or the volume will bury you.

You do not need to rank. You need to be the paragraph the answer gets built from.

I do marketing for a small SaaS, and the highest-return thing I've done in the last year isn't publishing. It's commenting on Reddit.

Google surfaces Reddit threads for a huge number of queries now the "best X", "X vs Y", "has anyone actually used X" ones buyers type. There's a discussions-and-forums block that pushes forum results high, Google signed a data licensing deal with Reddit in early 2024, and AI Overviews and ChatGPT lean heavily on user-generated content, with Reddit near the top of the most-cited domains. I'm skipping exact percentages here because they move every quarter and half the ones circulating are misquoted. The direction is what matters.

The upshot: a useful comment on a thread that already ranks can be visible in Google within days. A new blog post chasing the same query is a six-month project that probably never gets traffic at all.

Finding them is the easy part. Search site:reddit.com "your keyword", then search the plain query without the operator and check the thread is actually on page one. Skip anything locked or archived. Have some comment karma or you'll get auto-filtered regardless of what you write.

Writing the comment matters more. Answer the actual question in full before you mention anything you're involved in, if the comment is still useful with your product deleted from it, it's a comment; if it collapses, it's an ad. Disclose that you built the thing. Don't drop a link every time, since links are what trigger automod. And name alternatives, including free ones, because a comment naming exactly one option reads as marketing to everybody.

You can do all this by hand, and at small scale you should: weekly site: searches, Reddit search sorted by new for your terms and competitor names, Quora and HN separately. What breaks is timing. You'll catch the old threads that already rank, but you'll miss most fresh ones, and fresh is where the wins are, comments posted in the first few hours collect the votes and end up on top, and the top comment is what someone reads six months later when the thread starts ranking. Refreshing four subreddits all day isn't a workflow anyone sustains.

So I automate the monitoring. I use ParseStream, but you can use whatever tool you want. Just make sure it has AI filtering built in, because you will drown in noise otherwise.

The tool isn't the point. Being early and useful in threads Google already trusts is.