Reddit has become something rare in today’s internet: a place where people still ask genuine questions and expect real answers.
No carefully crafted brand voices. No performative LinkedIn thought leadership. Just people trying to solve actual problems.
For anyone building products, doing customer research, or trying to understand a market, Reddit is gold. The problem is that mining that gold manually is absolutely brutal.
The Manual Approach Doesn’t Scale
I spent months occasionally checking relevant subreddits. r/entrepreneur, r/SaaS, r/nocode, wherever our potential users might hang out. I’d search for keywords like “workflow automation” or “business automation” and see what people were asking about.
It worked, sort of. But it was inconsistent. I’d catch conversations three days late. I’d miss entire threads because I wasn’t searching the right terms. And honestly, I just couldn’t maintain the discipline to check multiple subreddits daily.
Reddit’s API restrictions make this even harder. You can’t just build a simple scraper. The platform is deliberately difficult to monitor at scale.
Building a System That Actually Works
We built a workflow that solves this. Here’s how it works:
F5Bot monitors specific keywords across Reddit and sends email notifications when they appear. Our Needle workflow picks up these emails every 48 hours, filters them for relevance, and uses an AI agent to analyze each post and its comments.
The agent determines if the conversation is actually relevant to us (filtering out false positives), generates a contextual response suggestion, and sends everything to a Slack channel with the post summary, link, and draft reply ready to go.
Instead of spending hours scrolling, we get a curated feed of opportunities where we can actually add value.
The Unexpected Benefit: Market Validation
What started as a marketing tool became our best market research mechanism.
Want to know if the problem you’re solving actually exists? Check Reddit. Want to understand how people describe their pain points? Reddit. Want to see what solutions they’ve already tried and why those solutions failed? Reddit.
The raw, unfiltered nature of Reddit discussions gives you insights you’ll never get from a customer survey. People complain freely. They describe workarounds. They mention adjacent problems you hadn’t considered.
We’ve used this workflow to validate feature ideas, refine our messaging, and identify entire use cases we hadn’t thought about.
How to Set This Up Yourself
The workflow is actually straightforward.
Create a free F5Bot account and set up keyword tracking for terms relevant to your market. Connect your Gmail to Needle to pull in F5Bot notifications. Use Needle’s AI agent to analyze posts, filter for relevance, and generate response suggestions. Route everything to Slack or wherever you prefer.
We’ve made the template free to use. You’ll need a Needle account (also free to start) and F5Bot (free).
A Few Practical Notes
On keyword selection: Start broad, then narrow. We track terms like “automation,” “workflow builder,” “business automation.” Some generate noise, but the AI filtering handles that.
On responding: The workflow generates suggestions, but you should always personalize before posting. Reddit users can smell automation from a mile away. The goal is to save time on discovery, not to spam threads with generic responses.
On enhancement possibilities: Right now we route to Slack, but you could build this out further. Store posts in a Needle collection to build a searchable Reddit knowledge base. Connect it to your CRM. Feed it into your product roadmap tool. The possibilities are pretty open.
Why This Matters Beyond Marketing
I think there’s something valuable here beyond just finding places to mention your product.
Reddit represents one of the last corners of the internet where people have real, unfiltered conversations about their problems. As AI-generated content floods the web, these authentic discussions become more valuable, not less.
Having a system to actually listen to these conversations at scale, consistently, is increasingly important for anyone building products or trying to understand markets.
The workflow we built does that. And if you’re curious to try it, the template is available.
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https://needle.app/workflow-templates/track-relevant-reddit-posts-with-f5-bot
