Reddit lead generation that never posts for you

What Reddit lead generation looks like for a B2B team

Reddit lead generation is not list building. Nobody hands you an email address. What you find is a conversation: someone writes "what do you use for this?" or "I'm leaving this tool, any alternatives?", and a useful answer posted soon after can start a relationship that a cold email would not.

That makes it a slow channel with a high bar for manners. A reply is not a lead, some threads will get no answer, and FoxKnock promises no results.

Reddit's platform rules ask you to abide by community rules, participate authentically and not to spam, and each subreddit sets its own rules, some of which restrict self-promotion. A team that treats threads as an ad slot risks losing its account. A team that answers well, says who it works for and mentions the product only when it fits has a better chance of finding customers there. The community radar is built around that second approach.

How to find customers on Reddit

By hand, the method is simple and the cost is time:

• Search the questions buyers type. A problem phrase or "alternative to" a competitor surfaces more real questions than a category name.
• Pick subreddits where practitioners ask for advice, not ones that ban tool questions.
• Answer the question first. Mention your product only when it fits, and say that you work for it.

Searching every day is where the hours go. The community radar automates the finding and the scoring and drafts the replies, and you still post them yourself.

How the community radar finds and scores threads

You set up the radar once. Save up to 20 keywords (written the way buyers write them) and up to 20 subreddits, and add exclude keywords to cut noise. Suggest from my playbook drafts a starting list from the brief FoxKnock wrote for your company. Then choose a schedule: hourly, daily or weekly.

Each scan searches Reddit and Hacker News, plus X if you added a Monid key. The public search uses the first 4 keywords and the first 5 subreddits you saved, so put the sharpest ones first.

Claude, by Anthropic, then scores the new threads that match your keywords, up to 60 per scan, from 0 to 100 for how well each one matches your offer, and tags the intent. If the AI is unavailable, or a scan finds more than 60, a keyword-based score stands in. Thread text and your company brief are sent to Anthropic to do this.

What happens next depends on the score:

• Under 40: the thread is dropped.
• 40 and up: the thread is saved with its match score, intent and matched keywords. The best ones, up to 10 per scan, get a drafted reply.
• 75 and up: the thread also becomes a community signal, up to 25 per scan, one of the buyer intent signals (see B2B buying signals for what makes a signal worth acting on). Every thread with a drafted reply also appears in your Today queue.

The first draft is always in the helpful style. You can switch style, ask for a rewrite or edit the text yourself.

Reply styles, account stages and safety rules

Communities ban accounts that look like ads, so the radar limits what it drafts by how established your account is. You declare the stage yourself, for the account you will post from.

The three styles:

• Helpful: pure advice, with no product mention.
• Soft mention: answers first, then names your product as one option.
• Direct: says plainly that you built it.

A switch in the account safety panel, "Let drafts mention my product", makes every draft pure advice when it is off.

The radar also applies rules to the text. It strips links below Trusted and adds a disclosure line if a draft mentions your product without one. These are the in-app safety rules, and they are our guidance, not Reddit policy:

• One reply per author per week.
• Space replies about an hour apart.
• Keep roughly 9 of 10 replies free of any product mention.
• Read the community's rules before you post.
• Disclose your affiliation every time you mention your product.

The caps and pacing notes are warnings. Only you decide when a reply goes out.

Using the drafts well

• Edit every draft. Drafts use general knowledge and your playbook, and they are told not to invent personal experience. Where a first-hand detail would help they leave a bracketed placeholder. Fill it in or delete it before you post.
• Stay at the helpful style for a while. Most replies should carry no pitch.
• Follow up. Marking a thread replied can leave a task two days out to check for an answer.

Hacker News lead generation

Hacker News lead generation works like Reddit's, with a more technical crowd. FoxKnock searches Hacker News through public search and scores its threads the same way.

The difference is in the reply. The Hacker News guidelines ask people not to post generated or AI-edited text and not to automate posting. Use the radar to find the thread, then write the comment yourself, in your own words.

Social listening for B2B leads: how the radar compares

The usual routes are searching by hand, keyword alerts and audience-research tools:

• Searching by hand is free, but it eats time every day and scores nothing.
• Plain keyword alerts tell you a thread exists without judging whether the author wants a tool.
• Audience research maps what a niche talks about, a different job from answering one person's question.

Think of the radar as social listening for B2B leads that ends in a reply you edit and post yourself, not a dashboard. Scoring, drafts and safety rules sit in one place, and drafted threads land in Today next to the rest of your day's work.

Outbound email follows a different rule: by default FoxKnock sends it from your mailbox only after you approve it. Community replies are never sent by FoxKnock at all.

GummySearch, a Reddit audience research tool, stopped accepting new customers on November 30, 2025 and is scheduled to shut down on December 1, 2026, according to its own notice (checked October 17, 2026). If you relied on it, decide which job you need to replace. FoxKnock does not replace audience research. It covers one narrower job: finding threads where someone is asking for what you sell. The wider list is in GummySearch alternatives.

What it costs and how to try it

At default credit prices, a thread with a drafted reply costs 25 credits. One credit is $0.01 at list price, so that is about $0.25. Credit prices can change, so check the pricing page for current numbers.

• Searching and scoring threads do not charge credits. A thread costs credits only when a reply is drafted.
• Switching style or asking for a rewrite writes a new draft and costs credits again. Editing by hand is free.
• A scan drafts at most 10 threads. It stops drafting when your credits run out or the monthly spend cap you set in Billing is reached.
• Scoring uses Claude too. It costs no credits, but it counts toward a daily AI budget when you use FoxKnock's Anthropic key. Once that budget is used up, keyword scores stand in and drafts are skipped without a charge.

As an illustration with made-up numbers, a small agency that drafts 8 replies in a week spends 200 credits at default prices, about $2 at list price.

Free comes with 500 one-time credits and no card, so you can try FoxKnock on your own market first; the pricing page lists community radar from the Starter plan ($49 a month, 5,000 credits).