Finding Buying Signals on Reddit: A Founder's Guide

A buying signal is any public statement that reveals someone is close to a purchase decision. On Reddit, people broadcast these constantly — “best IPTV for the World Cup that's cheap”, “busco proveedor”, “alternative to [competitor] that doesn't suck”. Each one is a warm lead with a timestamp. The problem was never whether signals exist; it's finding them among everything else.

The four levels of intent

Not all mentions are equal. A practical scoring rubric:

• •80-100 — explicit intent: asking for providers, recommendations, “where can I buy”, comparing options to purchase now.
• •50-79 — problem-aware: describing a problem your product solves, how-to questions implying tool need.
• •20-49 — topical: discussing the space, sharing news or opinions.
• •0-19 — noise: memes, spam, self-promotion.

Why manual scanning fails

A mid-size keyword produces 50-200 mentions weekly. At level-4 noise ratios, finding the five level-1 posts means reading everything — an hour daily that founders don't have. And speed compounds the problem: high-intent threads get answered within hours, so finding them late means finding them worthless.

Scoring at scale with AI

This rubric is exactly what LLMs are good at applying consistently. RedditQuik scores every collected mention against it automatically — in our own IPTV test, posts like “best iptv for world cup that is cheap” scored 100 while player-app memes scored under 20. Sorting by score turns an hour of reading into two minutes of triage.

Converting a signal into a customer

When you find a green thread: answer fast (first useful answers win the asker and the upvotes), answer fully (their actual question, not your pitch), then add one honest line about your product with disclosure. Track your reply-to-signup rate — for well-targeted keywords, single-digit conversion on replies is normal and compounds as threads rank on Google.