Buying-intent monitoring for devtool startups

The idea

The highest-converting channel most devtool startups have is a thread they didn’t start: someone on HN or r/devops asking what do people use for X, with their exact category in the blank. Founders find these threads three days late through vanity searches, after the thread went cold and a competitor’s users filled it. Monitoring a dozen communities around the clock is a job nobody staffs, and generic social-listening tools drown the signal in mentions without intent.

Launch Club proves founders pay real money for productized Reddit distribution. Narrowing to devtools sharpens every layer a horizontal tool can’t: the venue list (HN, specific subreddits, Lobsters, Stack Overflow), what buying intent looks like in developer language, and — most importantly — what tone survives. Dev communities execute marketers in public, so the reply drafts encode the norms: answer first, disclose affiliation, recommend an alternative too. Never auto-post; the founder’s judgment stays in the loop, which is also what keeps accounts from getting banned.

Who pays

Devtool founders and DevRel leads at seed-to-Series-A companies pay $49-149 a month — one converted thread can be worth a year of the subscription, and DevRel already owns a community budget. The buyer is unusually easy to reach because they live exactly where the product monitors: launch on HN, be visibly useful in r/SaaS and devtool founder communities, and let the tool’s own alerts about people asking for community monitoring close the loop. Weekly digest of found-threads screenshots is the content engine.

MVP scope

• Watchlist onboarding with proposed subreddits, HN, Lobsters, and SO tags plus keyword/competitor sets
• 10-minute polling of posts and comment trees with two-axis LLM classification and lead scoring
• Lead inbox with full thread context, Slack/email alerts on high scores, median time-to-alert metric
• Norm-encoded reply drafts with manual copy-and-post workflow, never auto-posting
• Stripe tiers; weekly digest email
• Skip for v1: Discord/Slack community monitoring, X/Twitter, auto-posting (permanently), sentiment dashboards, historical backfill beyond 30 days

Build DevRadar, a buying-intent monitor for devtool startups. Stack: Next.js, Reddit API + HN Algolia API (plus Lobsters RSS and Stack Overflow API), Claude API for classification and drafting, Postgres.

Core flow: 1) Onboarding: founder describes their product, category, and 3-5 competitors; the app proposes a watchlist (relevant subreddits, HN, Lobsters, SO tags) and keyword sets — category terms, competitor names, problem phrases. 2) A poller ingests new posts and comments every 10 minutes. 3) Claude classifies each hit on two axes: intent (evaluating-tools, asking-for-recommendations, complaining-about-competitor, general-discussion, irrelevant) and fit to the product description, producing a 0-100 lead score with a one-line why. 4) Anything above threshold lands in the inbox with full thread context; high scores also fire a Slack/email alert — speed matters, threads go cold in hours. 5) For each lead, Claude drafts a reply following dev-community norms encoded in the prompt: answer the actual question first, mention the product once with a disclosure (I work on X), no marketing adjectives, include a genuine alternative. Founder edits and posts manually — the tool never auto-posts. 6) A tracker records posted replies and their upvotes.

Pages: onboarding, lead inbox with thread view and draft pane, watchlist editor, alert settings, weekly digest, billing.

Non-obvious details: comments, not just posts, carry most buying intent — poll comment trees of matched threads; show median time-to-alert on the dashboard as the differentiating metric.

Pricing: $49/mo (1 product, daily digest), $99/mo (real-time alerts, reply drafts), $149/mo (3 products, team seats).