You do not need an audience. You need the right thread.
Lidar watches the communities where people describe the problem you just built something for, and tells you which posts are worth a reply.
Is there a self-hosted alternative to the usual uptime monitoring services? Paying $30 a month to ping six endpoints feels ridiculous and I already have a server sitting there.
Why it matched. An explicit alternative hunt with a stated constraint and a named price they resent. The switching signal and the budget arrive in the same sentence.
Why the usual channels do not fit.
Launch day is not a strategy
Directory launches give you a spike, a handful of signups from other builders, and a flat line by Thursday. Peer curiosity is not demand, and the people who upvoted your launch are building something themselves.
You cannot outspend anyone
Every paid channel assumes a budget you do not have and a payback period you cannot survive. The channels available to you are the ones that cost attention instead of money.
Reading Reddit daily does not survive a busy week
The manual version genuinely works. It also collapses the first week you are shipping something, and the threads you miss are gone, because a Reddit post has a half-life measured in hours.
Where indie hackers find people worth talking to.
A starting set. The full comparison for this market is in the subreddit guide, and every community has its own page with the rules and the intent we see.
Questions
Is €14 a month worth it before I have revenue?
Only you can answer that, and the honest version is that if you are watching one subreddit you should do it by hand for free. The maths changes around the fourth community, or the first week you are too busy to look.
Can I just use F5Bot?
For your brand name, yes, and you should. It is free and good at that. It will not find the person describing your problem without using your words, which is most of them.
Will it write the replies for me?
No, deliberately. Generated replies get detected, downvoted and banned, and the account you lose is the one with your history on it. The reply is the part that has to be yours.
What if I am pre-launch?
Then use it to find out whether anybody has the problem at all. A month of reading what people actually complain about is worth more than a month of building against a guess.
Start with indie hackers in mind.
Paste your website. We read it, suggest the subreddits, and you edit them before anything starts. Every project opens with a 7 day trial.