The best subreddits for finding B2B SaaS customers
Twelve communities where operators describe the problems B2B software solves, ranked by buying intent, with the promotion policy for each.
The most common mistake in B2B SaaS is going to the subreddits full of people who build software instead of the subreddits full of people who buy it. r/Entrepreneur has millions of subscribers and almost all of them are selling something. The office manager who is quietly losing four hours a week to a spreadsheet is somewhere else entirely.
The communities worth your time are organised around a job, not around having a company. People post there because a specific part of their work is broken, and they describe it in the vocabulary of that job rather than the vocabulary of software categories. That is exactly what makes them valuable and exactly what makes them hard to find with keyword alerts.
This list is ordered by how often the average post describes a solvable problem, which is a different ranking from size and a much more useful one.
The list
Intent is our estimate of how often the average post describes a problem somebody would pay to solve. Policy is how the community treats promotion, which is the thing most likely to get you removed. Both change over time, so treat this as a starting point and read the rules yourself.
| Community | Size | Intent | Policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/smallbusiness | Very large | High | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/msp | Mid-size | High | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/sales | Large | High | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/ProjectManagement | Mid-size | High | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/humanresources | Mid-size | High | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/accounting | Large | Medium | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/consulting | Mid-size | Medium | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/CustomerSuccess | Niche | Medium | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/marketing | Very large | Medium | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
| r/startups | Very large | Low | No promotion of any kind |
| r/SaaS | Large | Low | Promotion allowed with disclosure |
| r/Entrepreneur | Very large | Low | Mentions allowed inside helpful comments |
Where to spend your time
These are the communities that reward daily reading. If you only have fifteen minutes, they are the fifteen minutes.
r/smallbusiness · Owner-operators of real businesses with real budgets
The best general-purpose B2B community on Reddit. People post about specific operational problems and expect tool recommendations in the answers. Promotion in a top-level post gets removed; a disclosed mention inside a genuinely helpful comment is normal and accepted.
Very large · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/msp · Managed service providers buying tools for client fleets
Unusually high value because members buy software professionally and buy it repeatedly. They are also expert, sceptical and allergic to marketing language. One thin answer here costs you the community permanently.
Mid-size · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/sales · Working sales professionals and their managers
Tooling discussion is constant and members are unusually willing to name what they pay. They also detect a pitch faster than any community on this list, because detecting pitches is their job.
Large · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/ProjectManagement · PMs and delivery leads across industries
Recurring threads about tooling, process and reporting, with concrete constraints attached. Members frequently hold or influence the budget for exactly the category they are asking about.
Mid-size · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/humanresources · HR generalists and people ops
Compliance deadlines and headcount changes drive purchases on a schedule, which makes intent unusually predictable. Strict on anything that looks like vendor participation, so disclosure has to be immediate and obvious.
Mid-size · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
Worth knowing, not worth a daily visit
These either have lower problem density, no purchasing power, or rules that make participation pointless for a vendor. Several are on the list specifically so you recognise them as traps.
r/accounting · Accountants, bookkeepers and finance staff
Deeply conservative about tooling and slow to switch, which makes them poor prospects for anything novel and excellent ones for anything that removes manual reconciliation. Seasonal, with intent spiking around reporting deadlines.
Large · Intent: Medium · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/consulting · Independent consultants and small firms
Buys tools out of personal profit rather than a departmental budget, so price sensitivity is high and decisions are fast. Good for anything touching proposals, time tracking or client reporting.
Mid-size · Intent: Medium · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/CustomerSuccess · CS managers and support leads
Small but focused, with recurring discussion of workflow and tooling gaps. Low volume means you can read everything, and being a recognised regular here takes weeks rather than months.
Niche · Intent: Medium · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/marketing · In-house marketers and agency staff
High volume and correspondingly noisy, with a lot of career and portfolio content between the useful threads. Tool questions do get asked and answered, but you are competing with every other marketing tool for the reply.
Very large · Intent: Medium · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
r/startups · Early-stage founders and their first hires
Strictly moderated with an explicit ban on promotion, and the membership is mostly people who have not bought anything yet. Useful for understanding what early teams struggle with, worthless as pipeline.
Very large · Intent: Low · No promotion of any kind
r/SaaS · People building SaaS, not people buying it
Promotion is broadly permitted and the resulting feed is mostly founders marketing to other founders. Genuinely good for feedback on positioning and pricing. Treat any signups from it as peer curiosity rather than demand.
Large · Intent: Low · Promotion allowed with disclosure
r/Entrepreneur · Aspiring and early founders
The largest business community and close to the least productive. Discussion skews motivational, and the proportion of members who operate a business with a software budget is small. Included so you can consciously skip it.
Very large · Intent: Low · Mentions allowed inside helpful comments
What intent looks like in B2B SaaS
Generic buying signals apply everywhere. These four are specific to this audience and are the ones worth training your eye on.
The spreadsheet confession
Somebody admits their process runs on a shared sheet that has stopped coping. This is the single most reliable B2B signal there is, because it names the incumbent, the breaking point and the workflow in one sentence.
The headcount trigger
“We just hired our fifth person and” is the start of a purchase. Team growth breaks informal processes on a predictable schedule, and the person posting has usually just been handed the problem.
The renewal complaint
An invoice landed and somebody is annoyed about it. Budget exists, the category is already approved internally, and the only open question is which vendor. This is the shortest path to a customer on the platform.
The compliance deadline
Audits, certifications and regulatory dates create purchases that cannot be deferred. When someone mentions a date, the timing question is already answered.
Three ways people waste this list
Treating founder subreddits as a market
r/SaaS and r/Entrepreneur are full of people with the same plan as you. They will give you feedback and they will not give you revenue. Use them for peer input and count them as zero pipeline.
Pitching in the wrong register
Operators do not talk about platforms and solutions, they talk about the specific afternoon that went badly. A reply written in category language marks you as a vendor before anyone reads the second sentence.
Ignoring the industry-specific communities
The generic business subreddits are crowded. The community for one profession with forty thousand members is not, and the people in it have identical workflows, which means one good answer is reusable for years.
Queries to start with
Run these sorted by new, restricted to the last week. They will not find everything, because the best threads frequently contain none of your category’s vocabulary, but they are a fast way to see whether a community is producing.
subreddit:smallbusiness ("what do you use" OR "any recommendations") NOT hiring
title:("alternative to" OR "instead of") subreddit:sales+marketing
selftext:"in a spreadsheet" AND (nightmare OR "falling apart" OR manual)
selftext:("we just hired" OR "growing team") AND (process OR tracking)The syntax is explained in full in the Reddit search operators guide.
How to work the list
- Pick six to eight, weighted toward the high-intent group. More than that and coverage collapses.
- Build one custom feed containing all of them so the daily check is a single URL.
- Read sorted by new, once a day. Threads older than about a day already have their answers.
- Answer the question first. Mention what you built only when it is genuinely the right answer, and disclose it plainly.
- Review monthly. Drop anything that has produced nothing in four weeks and replace it.
Pick two from the high-intent group and one from the peer group, and give them six weeks. The peer community teaches you the language and gives you feedback; the operator communities produce the actual conversations. Running only the peer ones is the most common way to conclude that Reddit does not work.
Expect the good threads to be sparse and unevenly distributed. A quiet fortnight in r/msp followed by three excellent threads in one week is normal, and it is why coverage matters more than cleverness.
If you would rather not read every new post yourself, that is what we built Lidar for: it watches the communities you pick, scores each post against what your product does, and sends a short daily list with the reason each one matched. The replying stays yours. The wider playbook is in the Reddit lead generation guide.