When founders ask "how do I find customers on Reddit?", the answer is usually a vague version of "find threads where people are asking for what you sell". But what does that actually look like?
We ran the data. Wayfind has scanned 4,288 Reddit opportunities across user products in three months. Of those, 903 were scored 80% or higher relevance by our AI scoring system. This post breaks down the patterns in those high-intent posts: the phrases that recur, the subreddit distribution, and what it tells you about where buying intent actually lives on Reddit.
The dataset
- 4,288 total opportunities scanned and stored across all users
- 903 scored 80%+ relevance (the threshold where the AI is confident this is a real fit)
- 532 scored 85%+
- 85 scored 90%+ (very high confidence)
- 60 unique subreddits appeared in the high-relevance set
- 3 months of scanning data (Feb 2026 to May 2026)
The scoring is done by GPT-4o-mini and reviewed against product context (description, target audience, keywords). 80%+ is the threshold we consider "worth replying to", and 90%+ is "your buyer is literally asking for your product."
The phrases that appear in high-intent titles
We extracted all titles from the 903 high-relevance posts and ran a phrase frequency analysis. The most common buying-intent signals:
- "looking for" — appeared in 50 titles (5.5%)
- "how do you" — 43 titles (4.8%)
- "need a" — 7 titles
- "alternative to" — 3 titles
- "how to find" — 3 titles
"Looking for" is the clearest pattern. When someone titles a post "Looking for a tool that...", "Looking for recommendations for...", or "Looking for someone who can...", the conversion probability is among the highest you will ever see on Reddit. The OP has explicitly stated they are shopping. Your reply doesn't need to overcome a pitch barrier; it needs to be the best answer.
"How do you" is the next signal. It is softer than "looking for", but the underlying intent is similar: the OP is asking how others solve a problem, often because their current approach is not working. A reply that names the tool category (and yours, in context) is almost always upvoted.
The match reasons tell a different story
Each opportunity also has a match_reason — an AI-generated explanation of why the post matched the user's product. Analyzing these reveals what AI is actually picking up on, not just the surface phrases:
- "looking for" — appeared in 99 match reasons (11%)
- "asking for" — 54 (6%)
- "tool that" — 13 (1.4%)
- "struggling" — 8 (0.9%)
The match reasons fire on "looking for" twice as often as titles do. That is because the AI catches intent even when the title is generic. A post titled "Quick question" might still be flagged as a high-fit lead because the body explicitly says "I am looking for software that..." even though the title gives nothing away.
The implication: if you are manually searching Reddit by keywords in titles, you are missing most of the high-intent posts. The body of the post is where intent is often expressed, even when the title is bland.
Sample high-intent posts (90%+ relevance)
Here are anonymized examples from the dataset. Product names removed because they belong to Wayfind users, but the structure of each post is preserved:
r/influencermarketing (rel=90): "19.8K followers, 8M views per month... still no paid collabs — what am I doing wrong?"
This is gold for any influencer-monetization tool. The OP is literally asking for help with the problem the product solves.
r/smallbusiness (rel=90): "Small business owners - What's one repetitive task you wish was easier?"
A direct call for product ideas, perfect for any automation or workflow tool. Tools targeting small business operations should be replying to every post like this.
r/productivity (rel=90): "Need the best way to productively study three-hundred pages in two weeks."
A study app or summarization tool can answer this directly. The OP isn't looking for a vendor; they're looking for a method, but the right tool is the answer to the method.
r/Twitch (rel=90): "Question about multistreaming"
A streaming tool that supports multi-platform broadcasting is the answer to this question. One sentence reply with the relevant tool name + a setup tip converts.
r/projectmanagement (rel=90): "Have you built effective automated workflow?"
Workflow and meeting-automation tools can answer this with concrete examples of what they automate.
r/relationship_advice (rel=90): "I (24M) didn't get my girlfriend a valentine's day gift"
This one is more surprising: a gift-recommendation product surfaced this thread. Reddit's buying intent shows up in unexpected subreddits — not just business communities.
The pattern across all 25 high-intent samples we reviewed: the OP describes a specific problem, asks for a solution, and provides context (their situation, what they tried, what didn't work). The post reads like a discovery call transcript.
Where these posts live
The 903 high-relevance posts are not evenly distributed. The top 10 subreddits account for over 75% of the volume:
- r/smallbusiness — 160 (18%)
- r/SaaS — 140 (15%)
- r/influencermarketing — 119 (13%)
- r/InstagramMarketing — 53 (6%)
- r/streaming — 51 (6%)
- r/UGCcreators — 44 (5%)
- r/SideProject — 33 (4%)
- r/Twitch — 30 (3%)
- r/EntrepreneurRideAlong — 28 (3%)
- r/DigitalMarketing — 27 (3%)
Two takeaways:
Generic business subs dominate by volume. r/smallbusiness and r/SaaS together produce 33% of all high-intent posts, partly because they have huge subscriber counts and partly because they cover diverse product categories. If your product fits anywhere in "B2B software for businesses with employees", you should be in both.
Vertical-specific subs are punching above their weight. r/influencermarketing has roughly 80K members, but it produces more high-fit opportunities than r/InstagramMarketing (300K members) and r/DigitalMarketing (700K members). The vertical specificity beats the size of the audience for buyer concentration.
The full list of 60 high-relevance subreddits spans wildly different categories: r/mealprep, r/languagelearning, r/GiftIdeas, r/Cooking, r/LongDistance. The data argues against the "just post in r/SaaS" instinct. Your buyers are wherever they are, and they are often in surprising places.
What this means for your strategy
Three operational takeaways from the data:
1. Search for intent phrases, not just keywords. "Looking for" is the most reliable signal in titles. "How do you" is second. Setting up Reddit searches that filter for these phrases plus your product category will dramatically increase your hit rate compared to keyword-only searches.
2. The right subreddit is product-specific. No two products in our dataset have the same top-5 list. r/SaaS dominates for some, while r/mealprep dominates for others. The single best thing you can do is figure out the 5-10 subreddits that contain your buyers, not the 5-10 that are popular for SaaS marketing.
3. The body of the post matters more than the title. Manual keyword search on titles misses 60-70% of high-intent posts. An AI that reads the full content of each post catches intent that a title alone misses.
The Wayfind product does all three automatically: filters for intent phrases, customizes the subreddit list per product, and reads full post content to score relevance. If you want to see what this looks like for your product right now, paste your URL into the Reddit Lead Finder. It runs the same scan and returns the top 10 high-intent posts for your specific product, with no signup.
What we'd add to this dataset next
A few follow-up analyses we'll publish as the dataset grows:
- Conversion-tracking on replied-to posts. Currently we track whether a user posted a reply, but not whether the OP converted. This would give us a true funnel.
- Time-to-reply correlation. Does replying within 30 minutes outperform replying after 4 hours?
- Reply structure analysis. Which reply structures (acknowledgment + recommendation, story + recommendation, etc.) tend to get upvoted?
The dataset is growing. Three months of scanning gave us 903 high-intent posts; six months should give us several thousand and enough statistical power for deeper analysis. We will publish more posts in this series as the data accumulates.
For the playbook on actually engaging with these posts once you find them, see Reddit Marketing for SaaS: The 2026 Playbook.