Founder-led sales: how to find your first buyers in public conversations

A founder has little time, no brand yet and no data on who buys. Public posts take care of the last two.

• Someone who writes "need a tool that does X" has told you their role, their problem and often their budget. You get your ideal customer profile one post at a time.
• You're answering a question, so your credibility comes from the answer and not from a logo.
• A search takes minutes and needs no sequence tool or list, so you can fit it around a day job.

The cost is scale. In a narrow niche, public requests can arrive slowly. If you're after your first ten customers, a slow trickle of well-matched people is often enough.

Everything depends on one sentence: what would a buyer type when they have the problem you solve? Write it in their words.

Weak: "We provide workflow automation for professional services firms." Strong: "Our team spends hours copying client data between our CRM and our billing tool. Is there something that syncs them?"

Write one for each of three buyer moments:

1. Asking for a recommendation. "Anyone use something for X?"
2. Comparing or leaving. "Alternatives to Tool A?" "Switching from Tool A."
3. Describing the pain. "I hate that I have to do X by hand."

These become your searches. The X search operators cheat sheet and the Reddit search guide show how to write them.

Run it as three short sessions and one longer one. Treat the times as a rough guide.

On Monday, spend 20 minutes collecting. Run your saved searches on X and Reddit, open anything that looks like a request, and copy the link and the key sentence into a sheet.

On Wednesday, spend 30 minutes replying. Pick the best three and reply to each in the thread. Answer the question first.

On Friday, spend 20 minutes following up. Check replies and answer any follow-up questions. If someone asks for more, offer a call or a short demo.

On Sunday, spend 30 minutes reviewing. Work out which phrases found buyers and which found noise, then edit the searches. Note what each buyer said, in their words.

That's about 100 minutes a week. If it takes longer, tighten the searches.

These sample posts are scored from 0 to 100 for buying intent, the same way HearBuyers scores them.

• Sample, score 90: "We're a six-person agency and our time tracking is a mess. Need something that connects to invoicing. Budget isn't a problem, we just need it by month end." Reply today.
• Sample, score 62: "How do small agencies handle time tracking?" Reply with real experience. The poster isn't ready to buy, but a useful answer is likely to stick with them.
• Sample, score 8: "Built a time tracker, would love feedback, link below." This is another founder. Skip it, or support them as a peer.

Sample reply to the first post:

Sample reply. "Time tracking that connects to invoicing usually breaks at the project level: if clients and projects are named differently in each tool, nothing matches. Whatever you choose, test it with your three messiest clients first. I build one of these (Tool X), so I'm biased, but happy to walk through what to check in any of them. What are you using for invoices right now?"

This works because it answers the question, says how the writer is connected, and ends on a question that keeps the conversation going. It has no link, since most communities ban or dislike links in a first reply.

HearBuyers drafts replies like this for posts at or above your score threshold, and a person edits and posts each one. If you'd rather do it all by hand, the routine above works with free searches.

1. Wait for them to respond. Don't open with a private message; replying in public shows you're not a bot.
2. Move to a direct message only when they invite you to, or when they ask for details you can't share in public.
3. Offer a short call instead of a demo. "Fifteen minutes to see if it fits" asks less of them.
4. Ask questions before you pitch. What are you using today? What have you tried? What would make this a no?
5. Write down the words they use. Those calls are where you'll find the best copy for your site.

• A pitch in your first reply reads as an ad and gets removed. Answer the question first.
• Some communities ban any mention of your product, so check their rules before you post. The subreddit rules tool will pull them up.
• Your first replies won't get many responses. Don't quit after a week; judge the routine after a month.
• If you reply to everything, your afternoons go on lower-scoring posts. Set a cutoff.
• If you mention your product, say you build it.
• Keep a list of what you replied to and what happened. You can't improve without it.

Public conversations won't reach enterprise buyers who never post. They also won't replace outbound to a defined list when you know exactly whom you want. Use them as the quickest route to your first ten buyers, and keep using them to learn the words your market uses.

Reddit's public data access changes between 31 October 2026 and March 2027, and tools that read Reddit may cover less while that happens. Searching Reddit by hand is not affected.

For more on turning stated intent into conversations, see sales signals. The narrower workflows are in Reddit lead generation and the 20-minute X routine.

For channel-by-channel detail on one market, see lead generation for B2B SaaS and lead generation for consultants.

Founder-led sales means the founder sells before hiring a sales team, or alongside one. The founder finds buyers, runs the calls and learns what works.

Hire once the founder can describe a repeatable way to find, qualify and close buyers. Hire before that and you're paying someone to work it out for you.

There's no fixed number. Keep going until new calls stop changing what you know about who buys and why.

Yes. You don't need followers to reply in someone else's thread, only a helpful answer.

Write down the three buyer sentences today. Search once for each, then reply to the best match before the week is out.