---
title: "How to find customers on Reddit with Claude Code (5 minutes a day, no spam) | Mentio"
description: "Three prompts in Claude Code find the Reddit threads worth answering, draft honest replies and clean up for tomorrow. The routine, the rules that keep it out of spam, and what it costs."
canonical: https://mentio.dev/blog/find-customers-on-reddit/
markdown: https://mentio.dev/blog/find-customers-on-reddit/index.md
last-updated: 2026-09-23T16:19:37.703Z
---

# How to find customers on Reddit with Claude Code (5 minutes a day, no spam) | Mentio

> Three prompts in Claude Code find the Reddit threads worth answering, draft honest replies and clean up for tomorrow. The routine, the rules that keep it out of spam, and what it costs.

Source: https://mentio.dev/blog/find-customers-on-reddit/

Reddit is where developers ask each other what to use, and it is also the platform most hostile to anyone selling something. Both are true, and the second is why the first works. The people who get customers from Reddit are early and useful in a handful of threads a week. The people who get banned are late and everywhere.

This is the routine I run every morning to be early and useful without scrolling. It takes about five minutes, it runs inside Claude Code through Mentio’s MCP server, and every prompt below is one you can paste today.

The worked example is a real company: [Zernio](https://zernio.com), a social media API that lets an app publish to Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok and a dozen more platforms with one integration and no app reviews of its own. Mentio does the listening; Zernio is the product looking for customers. Swap in yours.

Key takeaways

-   Three kinds of Reddit thread turn into customers: someone asking what to use, someone complaining about a competitor, someone asking how to do the thing you sell.
-   One command connects Claude Code to Mentio through its MCP server, with OAuth and no API key.
-   Three prompts a day: find (`search_mentions` filtered by intent), draft (`get_mention`), clean up (`update_mention`). Under five minutes.
-   Post by hand, disclose that you built it, never DM, never reply late. An instant alert covers buying intent while you are away.
-   $5 per keyword per month and $0.008 per mention on Mentio; F5Bot for the raw feed if that is all you need.

## Which Reddit threads turn into customers?

Three kinds of thread are worth answering.

1.  **Someone asks what to use.** “Which API do you use to post to Instagram and LinkedIn from a SaaS?” The person wants a recommendation and will act on a good one.
2.  **Someone complains about a competitor**, or describes the workaround they built. They have the problem and have already tried to solve it.
3.  **Someone asks how to do the thing your product does.** They may not know a product exists. A good answer here is the whole pitch.

Everything else that mentions your keywords, and it is most of it, is noise: passing references, jokes, people who are years from buying. A routine only works if it hides those before you read them.

Thread

Sounds like

How the routine finds it

How you reply

Recommendation ask

“Which API do you use to post to Instagram and LinkedIn from a SaaS?”

Intent `question` on a category keyword

Answer with two or three options, yours included, and say you built it

Competitor complaint

“Meta rejected our app review for instagram\_content\_publish again”

Any intent on a competitor or platform keyword, sentiment negative

Explain the cause, name the fix, mention yours only if it fixes it

How-do-I question

“How do I schedule posts to five platforms without five OAuth apps?”

Intent `question` on a problem phrase

Give the free way first, then the paid way

Four rules keep the routine out of spam, and I will come back to them at the end:

-   Reply only where you would reply without a product to sell.
-   Answer the question first. Mention your product only when it is the honest answer, and say you built it.
-   Never DM. Never post the same reply twice. Never reply late: after about six hours a thread is over.
-   Post by hand. The agent finds and drafts. A person decides and clicks.

## What would you have to build yourself?

More than it looks, and the first wall is not code.

**Getting the data.** Reddit’s Data API is free on paper, within 100 requests a minute per registered app. In practice, under the 2026 rules, new apps for reading Reddit at scale are not being approved: the registration form is still there, the approvals do not arrive, and commercial use was never inside the free tier to begin with. The numbers and the terms are in the [Reddit API pricing](/blog/reddit-api-pricing/) post. Scraping the site instead breaks the terms and breaks weekly. Mentio reads Reddit through the official API where it can and a licensed data provider where it cannot, and that access is a large part of what you are paying for.

**Then the system.** Assume you have access. What sits between “a post was published” and “Claude showed me the two worth answering” is:

-   A poller that searches every keyword every 30 minutes, keeps a cursor per keyword, and never fetches the same page twice.
-   Deduplication, because one post matches three keywords and you want to see it once.
-   Storage for every match, with the author, the subreddit and the timestamps, so a thread can be found again next week.
-   A classifier that scores each match for relevance, sentiment and intent, retries when the model fails, and never bills you for a failure.
-   Delivery: Slack, Telegram, email, webhooks, with rate limits so an alert storm does not get your domain flagged.
-   Retention, so the store does not grow forever, and idempotent queues, so a crash re-processes instead of losing posts.
-   An MCP server on top, with OAuth, so an agent can read all of it without an API key in a config file.

That is a few weeks of work to build and a permanent job to run. Mentio is that system, behind one MCP server, at $5 per keyword per month, so the rest of this post is the routine and not the plumbing.

## How do you connect Claude Code to Mentio?

**First, an account.** Sign up at [app.mentio.dev](https://app.mentio.dev/login?mode=signup&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=find-customers-on-reddit) with Google, GitHub or an email. Every new workspace starts with $5.80 of credit, which is one keyword for a month plus 100 mentions, with no card and no plan. The onboarding asks for your website and a first keyword and offers to connect Slack; it takes about two minutes, and the first mentions arrive while you read the rest of this.

![The Mentio dashboard: the mentions feed, each post with its platform, author, relevance score, sentiment and intent](/press/screenshot-mentions.png)

What you land on after onboarding: every match, scored, with the platform and the author. The routine below reads this same feed through Claude.

**Then one command.** Claude asks Mentio where to sign in, the browser opens a consent page that names the client and the workspace, you approve once.

```
claude mcp add --transport http mentio https://mcp.mentio.dev/mcp
```

No API key to paste, no config file, nothing to delete from a screen recording afterwards. The same URL works as a custom connector in Cursor, Codex, claude.ai and ChatGPT; the [MCP docs](https://docs.mentio.dev/mcp) have each client’s steps. If you would rather use a key, the docs cover that too.

## Which keywords find buyers?

Keywords decide what the routine can find. Three groups, and I restrict them to Reddit and Hacker News so I pay for nothing I will not read. For Zernio they look like this:

-   **Category terms**: what people call the thing. `social media api`, `instagram api`, `linkedin api`.
-   **Competitor names**: where the complaints and the comparisons are. `Ayrshare`, `Unipile`, `Manychat`.
-   **Problem phrases**: how someone describes the pain before they know a product exists. `meta app review`, `post to multiple platforms`, `whatsapp business api pricing`.

The third group is where the best threads live: nobody typing “meta app review” is looking for a vendor yet, and that is exactly the moment to be useful. You can add keywords in the dashboard, or ask Claude:

```
Add these keywords to Mentio, Reddit and Hacker News only.
Category: "social media api", "instagram api", "linkedin api".
Competitors: "Ayrshare", "Unipile", "Manychat".
Problems: "meta app review", "post to multiple platforms", "whatsapp business api pricing".
Then list my keywords so I can check them.
```

Claude calls `add_keyword` once per term with the platforms restricted, then `list_keywords`. Nine keywords is $45 a month at full price; the welcome credit runs one of them for the first month, so start with the problem phrase that matters most.

Give it a few days

Keywords need two or three days of matches before the morning prompt has anything to show. Add them today, run the routine for the first time on Thursday.

Reddit is searched every 30 minutes and every match is scored for relevance, sentiment and intent; the intents are `buy_intent`, `question`, `complaint`, `praise` and `comparison`, and two of those are what the routine filters on.

![The five-minute routine as three steps: minute one, find, Claude searches Reddit mentions with question or buying intent; minutes two and three, draft, Claude writes replies under the four rules; minute five, clean up, Claude marks the answered threads done and the rest ignored](/blog/find-customers-on-reddit/routine.png)

Find, draft, clean up. Three prompts, one every morning.

## What does the five-minute routine look like?

### Minute one: what is worth answering today

```
Show me Reddit mentions since yesterday morning that are questions or buying signals,
relevant ones only, newest first. For each one give me: the subreddit, what the person
is actually asking in one line, and whether Zernio is an honest fit for it
(yes, partly, no) with a reason. Skip anything older than a day.
```

Claude calls `search_mentions` with the platform set to Reddit, `relevant` on, a `since` of yesterday, and the intent set to `question` and then `buy_intent`. What comes back is a numbered list. A typical morning looks like this (an example, not a real morning):

```
1. r/SaaS: building a scheduling feature, asks which API posts to Instagram and LinkedIn
   without running their own Meta app review. Fit: yes.
2. r/webdev: Meta rejected instagram_content_publish for the second time, asks what
   reviewers want to see. Fit: yes, the answer is the review checklist; Zernio is the
   way around it.
3. r/Entrepreneur: Manychat's price went up, asks for DM automation alternatives with an
   API. Fit: partly, Zernio does the messaging API, not the flow builder.
4. r/marketing: wants a TikTok analytics dashboard for an agency. Fit: no.
5. r/nocode: Make versus Zapier for cross-posting. Fit: no, they want no-code, not an API.
6. r/cscareerquestions: "social media API" in a job description. Fit: no.
```

The “no” verdicts are the point. Claude tells you where you do not belong, and you do not reply there.

### Minutes two and three: drafts, with the rules attached

```
Open #1 and #2 and draft a Reddit reply for each in my voice. Rules: answer their
question first and completely; mention Zernio only if it is genuinely the answer,
and if you do, say I work on it; no links unless they asked for one;
under 120 words; no bullet points; no marketing words.
```

Claude calls `get_mention` for each and prints two drafts. This is the draft for #2, after I cut one sentence:

> Meta reviewers reject `instagram_content_publish` for two reasons most of the time: the screencast does not show the exact permission being used end to end, or the app is in development mode and the test user is not a real Instagram Business account linked to a Facebook Page. Record the flow from login to a published post with a Business account, and describe the use case in the same words as the permission. Second try usually passes. If you would rather not run the review at all, Zernio wraps the publishing APIs so you never do (I work on it, so weigh that), but the checklist above is what gets you through Meta.

Read every draft as the person who asked would. The sentence I cut was a second mention of the product. The answer has to stand on its own; the disclosure stays; if someone wants the tool, they will ask.

### Minute four: post by hand

Open the two threads, paste, tweak, reply, from your own account. This is not a limitation of the setup, it is the rule that makes the setup safe. It keeps you inside Reddit’s terms, and it keeps the replies honest: if you would not put your name under it, it does not go out. What you still own in this routine is the reply. The finding, the sorting and the reminder are not yours anymore.

### Minute five: clean up, so tomorrow starts empty

```
Mark #1 and #2 as done with the note "replied 2026-09-14". Mark the others from
that list as ignored.
```

Claude calls `update_mention` for each with a status and a note. Tomorrow’s first prompt only sees what is new, which is what keeps the routine at five minutes on day thirty.

Run the routine on your own keywords

Connect Claude Code, add three keywords, and the first scored Reddit mentions arrive within the hour. $5.80 of credit to start, no card.

claude mcp add --transport http mentio https://mcp.mentio.dev/mcp

[Start free](https://app.mentio.dev/login?mode=signup&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=find-customers-on-reddit)[Read the docs](https://docs.mentio.dev/mcp)

## How do you catch buying signals while you sleep?

The routine covers the morning. Buying-intent threads do not wait for the morning, and the six-hour rule is unforgiving, so one more prompt:

```
Create an instant alert: any Reddit mention with buy intent, relevant only, sent to
my Slack channel. Call it "Reddit buying signals". Show me the alert when it is set up.
```

Claude calls `list_channels` and then `create_alert` with an instant rule filtered to Reddit and `buy_intent`. Slack has to be connected in the dashboard first; Telegram, email and webhooks work the same way. Everything that is not a buying signal can wait for the daily digest.

![The Alerts page of the Mentio dashboard: one instant rule sending to a Slack channel named #mentions, 95 alerts sent in the last seven days, and the channel listed under Channels](/press/screenshot-alerts.png)

The Alerts page after the prompt: the rule Claude created, the Slack channel it lands in, and how many it sent this week. Rules decide what you hear about; channels are where it lands.

## Can the routine be one command?

Three prompts a day is fine. One is better. Ask Claude to put the rules in the project’s `CLAUDE.md`, so they apply every day without being repeated, and to turn the routine into a skill:

```
Set this folder up as my Reddit routine. Write a CLAUDE.md with my reply rules:
answer first and completely, mention Zernio only when it is genuinely the answer
and say I work on it, no links unless asked, under 120 words, no bullets,
no marketing words, never DM, never post the same reply twice, and I post
everything by hand. Then create a skill called reddit-morning that does what we
just did in order: find yesterday's Reddit questions and buying signals through
Mentio with a fit verdict, draft replies for the ones I pick, and mark them done
or ignored when I say so.
```

The skill Claude writes is short, because the three prompts are the whole procedure:

```
---
name: reddit-morning
description: The daily Reddit routine through the Mentio MCP: find, draft, clean up.
---

1. Call search_mentions for Reddit, relevant only, since yesterday morning,
   once with intent "question" and once with intent "buy_intent".
   List each as: subreddit, the ask in one line, fit (yes / partly / no) and why.
2. Wait for the numbers I pick. For each, call get_mention and draft a reply
   under the rules in CLAUDE.md.
3. When I say "done", call update_mention: the ones I replied to become done
   with the note "replied <today>", the rest become ignored.
```

The next morning it is `/reddit-morning`, and the same three tool calls scroll past.

## What does it cost, and what is free?

You can do a version of this for nothing. [F5Bot](https://f5bot.com) emails you every Reddit and Hacker News post that contains your keyword, with no filtering, and Reddit’s own search works if you remember to check it. The [free tools roundup](/blog/best-free-social-listening-tools/) covers the rest.

What you pay Mentio for is the filter, the intent, the drafts through Claude, and the same routine covering Hacker News, X and Bluesky in one feed. The price is [$5 per keyword per month and $0.008 per matched mention](/pricing/), from a prepaid balance, no plan. The nine keywords above are $45 a month; a thousand matched mentions is $8. The welcome credit is $5.80, which is one keyword for a month plus 100 mentions, enough to run this routine for a month on your most important term and decide.

If you only need the raw feed, use F5Bot. I would.

## The four rules, checked

Only threads you would answer anyway: Claude filtered for them. Answer first, disclose, no pitch: you cut it from the draft. No DMs, no duplicates, no late replies: the alert handles late. Post by hand: you did.

Five minutes, three prompts, and Reddit becomes a place you answer questions in, which is the only kind of marketing it has ever rewarded.

## Frequently asked questions

How do I find customers on Reddit without getting banned?

Reply only in threads you would answer without a product to sell, answer the question first, mention your product only when it is the honest answer and say you built it, never DM, and post every reply by hand. Tools should find and draft; a person decides and clicks. The routine in this post follows those rules and has Claude Code do the finding.

Which Reddit threads actually turn into customers?

Three kinds: someone asking what tool to use, someone complaining about a competitor or describing a workaround, and someone asking how to do the thing your product does. Almost everything else that mentions your keywords is noise, which is why the routine filters by intent before you read anything.

Does Mentio post replies on Reddit for me?

No, on purpose. Mentio finds the mentions, scores them for relevance, sentiment and intent, and Claude drafts a reply through the MCP server. You read it, edit it and post it from your own account. That keeps you inside Reddit's rules and keeps the replies honest.

Can I run this routine without Claude Code?

Yes. The same MCP server works in Cursor, Codex, claude.ai and ChatGPT, the dashboard shows the same mentions with the same filters, and an instant alert can send buying-intent threads to Slack, Telegram or email with no agent at all.

Can I still get Reddit API access for monitoring?

Not easily. Reddit's Data API is free within 100 requests a minute per registered app, but under the 2026 rules new apps for reading Reddit at scale are not being approved, and commercial monitoring was never inside the free tier. Mentio reads Reddit through the official API where it can and a licensed data provider where it cannot; the Reddit API pricing post has the numbers and the terms.

Does Mentio search Reddit comments?

No. Reddit's official search API indexes posts, not comments, and Mentio uses the official API. Posts are where the recommendation asks and the how-do-I questions live, which is what this routine is after.

What does it cost to monitor Reddit this way?

On Mentio, $5 per keyword per month and $0.008 per matched mention, from a prepaid balance with no plan. The nine keywords in this post are $45 a month plus mentions. The welcome credit of $5.80 covers one keyword for a month plus 100 mentions. F5Bot does the raw Reddit feed for free, without the scoring or the drafts.

Where this applies

-   [Reddit monitoringEvery subreddit, checked every 30 minutes through the official API.](/reddit/)
-   [MCP serverOne URL for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, claude.ai and ChatGPT.](https://docs.mentio.dev/mcp)
-   [Reddit API pricingWhat building this yourself would cost.](/blog/reddit-api-pricing/)
-   [Pricing$5 per keyword per month, $0.008 per mention, no plan.](/pricing/)

Written by Pau Guirao, founder of Mentio. Prices and product facts were checked on September 14, 2026; if one has changed, [tell us](/contact/) and we will fix it.

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## [GummySearch alternatives in 2026: the Reddit tools left standing](/blog/gummysearch-alternatives/)

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## [Reddit API pricing in 2026: is it free, what it costs, who gets access](/blog/reddit-api-pricing/)

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-   [Platforms](/blog/tag/platforms/)
-   [Reddit](/blog/tag/reddit/)
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Sep 14, 2026

## [Twitter keyword alerts in 2026: what still works on X](/blog/twitter-keyword-alerts/)

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-   [Platforms](/blog/tag/platforms/)
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-   [Alerts](/blog/tag/alerts/)

## Start monitoring brand mentions

One request tracks your first keyword. The first scored mention lands within minutes, in Slack, a webhook, or your agent.

[Get your API key ›](https://app.mentio.dev/login?mode=signup)[Read the docs ›](https://docs.mentio.dev)

$5.80 free credit · no card · no subscription