What buying intent actually sounds like on Reddit
Nine phrasings that reliably precede a purchase, six that look promising and are not, and a scoring rubric you can apply in about eight seconds per post.
Everyone building in this space eventually discovers the same uncomfortable thing: the words people use when they are about to buy have almost nothing in common with the words in your product category.
A person ready to pay for invoicing software rarely types the word “invoicing software”. They type “I spent Saturday chasing three clients for money and I am done doing this by hand”. The intent is unmistakable to a human and invisible to a keyword filter.
This post is the pattern library. It is qualitative rather than statistical, drawn from reading a great many posts, and everything in it is meant to be usable by a person with no tooling at all.
The nine phrasings that carry intent
Requests
The most obvious group and still the most valuable, because the person has explicitly invited an answer.
- “What do you all use for…” The single highest-volume buying signal on the platform. It is a request for a shortlist from someone who has decided to acquire something.
- “Is there anything that does X?” Stronger than it looks. They have a specific requirement and have already failed to find it themselves.
- “Looking for something that…” Explicit search language, usually with constraints attached in the following sentence.
- “How do you handle…” Softer. They may be looking for a process rather than a product, which makes it a good thread to be useful in and a bad thread to pitch in.
Switching signals
The most under-exploited group. Somebody with an incumbent is already paying for the category, which removes the hardest objection you will ever face.
- “Alternative to X” Unambiguous. They have a budget, they have a vendor, and they are leaving.
- “We currently use X but…” The “but” is the whole signal. Whatever follows it is your positioning, written by your prospect.
- “Just got the renewal email and…” Timing attached to dissatisfaction. As good as public text gets.
Constraint statements
- “Under $X a month” or any stated budget. Somebody who names a number has been through a mental approval process already.
- “Needs to work with Y” An integration or compatibility requirement means they have a stack, which means they have a real workflow rather than a hypothetical one.
The six that look good and are not
| Phrasing | Why it looks promising | Why it is not |
|---|---|---|
| “X is terrible” | Dissatisfaction with an incumbent | Venting. No stated plan to do anything about it. |
| “Anyone else hate…” | Sounds like shared pain | Invites agreement, not solutions. Pitching here backfires. |
| “Is X worth it?” | Evaluating a purchase | Already shortlisted. You are arriving after the decision narrowed. |
| “Thinking about building…” | Has the problem | Wants to build it themselves. Different person entirely. |
| “Free alternative to X” | Switching language | The word free is the requirement, not the incumbent. |
| “For a school project” | Specific requirements | No budget and no continuity. Be helpful, expect nothing. |
Complaining deserves special mention because it is the signal most monitoring setups are accidentally optimised for. Negative sentiment about a competitor is easy to detect and feels like a lead. It is usually a person having a bad morning who will still be a customer of that competitor in a year.
Three worked examples
r/devops
“We have outgrown our current alerting setup, three people got paged for the same incident at 4am last night. Needs to integrate with PagerDuty and ideally under $200/mo for a team of eight. What is everyone running?”
High. A request, a constraint, and an implied timeline. Answer within the hour.
r/devops
“Datadog pricing is genuinely insane. That is it. That is the post.”
Low, despite naming a competitor and a real problem. No request, no constraint, no timing. This is the post a keyword tool will send you.
r/freelance
“Third month in a row I have spent a full Saturday on admin instead of client work. Something has to change before Q4 or I am going to lose the one client who actually pays on time.”
Medium, and worth answering. No category term, no vendor, no request. The constraint and the timing are both there, and a keyword filter cannot see any of it.
The eight-second rubric
You do not need a model to apply this. Three questions, one point each:
- Is there a request? Did they ask for input, in any form, however indirect?
- Is there a constraint? A budget, an integration, a team size, a must-have. Constraints indicate a real evaluation rather than a daydream.
- Is there timing? A deadline, a renewal, a breaking point, a “this month”.
Three points: reply now, carefully. Two points: reply. One point: be helpful with no mention of your product, which is how you become the person they remember later. Zero: skip it.
The rubric’s value is that it is cheap enough to apply to every post rather than to the ones you feel like reading, and consistency is worth more here than accuracy.
Two things that change everything
Recency
A three-point post from eight days ago is worth less than a one-point post from this morning. The thread has its answers, the person has chosen, and your reply arrives to an empty room. Sort by new, always.
The comments
Read them before replying. Half the time somebody has already given the answer you were going to give, and the useful move becomes adding the thing they missed rather than repeating them. The other half, the original poster has responded to a suggestion with “tried that, it does not do Y”, which is a far more specific brief than the post itself.
Turning this into a routine
By hand: run a few saved boolean queries built on the nine phrasings above, sorted by new, restricted to the last week. It works, and its ceiling is that it only finds posts containing words you predicted.
The ceiling is the point. Seven of the nine signals are structural, the third example above contains none of the vocabulary of its category, and those are exactly the threads with no competition in them because everyone else’s alerts missed them too. Reading every new post and judging it on meaning is the only thing that catches them, which is the job Lidar does and the reason alerting and qualifying are different products.
Whichever way you do it, the rubric is the same and it is the part worth keeping. Request, constraint, timing. Two out of three earns a reply.