We read 494 founder posts. Here is what they say

FirstCustomer is built on one bet: that the person your product is for is already describing their problem somewhere online, and if you can find that description, you can find the person. Before we shipped anything on top of that bet, we coded a corpus of 494 real founder posts about finding a first customer. Reddit, mostly, spread across r/SaaS, r/startups, r/microsaas, r/SideProject, r/indiehackers, and r/smallbusiness. The corpus came back in four shards of roughly 124 posts each. We read every one.

Some of what came back confirms the bet. A lot of it does not, and the part that does not is the more useful half.

The part that confirms the bet

Across the first shard alone, finding people to talk to is named as the actual blocker, ahead of building and ahead of the interview itself, in roughly 40 of 124 posts. One founder put it in almost exactly the words we would have chosen for our own pitch: "Everyone says 'just go talk to your users' like it's the easy part. It's not. The hard part is finding people to talk to in the first place." Across all four shards, the dominant recurring segment is a founder who has an idea or a rough prototype, no warm network, and no budget, and who explicitly refuses to build further until they can talk to a real person with the problem.

When these founders do try to reach people, the numbers they report are close to zero. One posted a full funnel: roughly 300 cold DMs and emails sent, 12 replies, 1 actual call, which the poster called a 0.3 percent conversion against an industry benchmark of 2 to 5 percent. Another sent 450 direct messages for 2 booked meetings. Another ran 78 cold LinkedIn messages into roughly 15 calls, then watched every one of those calls end the same way: interest, then a promise to think about it, then silence. Another sent over 100 cold emails in three days and got zero responses, a result repeated almost word for word by a second, unrelated poster in a different subreddit. A fourth reported needing 200 to 300 messages to produce one call.

That is the pain FirstCustomer is supposed to reduce, and the corpus states it plainly and often. So far, so good for the pitch.

The part that does not

Here is where it gets uncomfortable, because the corpus does not just describe the pain. It also describes the method we sell to fix it, and a meaningful share of the corpus argues that the method does not work, or that using it gets you removed.

Start with moderation. In the first shard, the same AutoModerator warning appears verbatim on six separate posts across r/smallbusiness: "Please do not conduct market research on our community. We are not your focus group." The second shard shows the identical bot firing on more threads in the same subreddit. This is not a mood or a norm being enforced by annoyed humans. It is an automated, standing rule, applied at the platform level, against the specific behavior of asking a community about its pain points.

When founders push past that and try anyway, the outcome the corpus records is not quiet failure, it is bans. One post carries 28 upvotes for summarizing the whole loop in three steps: talk to five potential users, get banned from the subreddits where your real users actually post, go back and post in the startup subreddits where you will never find them. A reply to that same post, with 5 upvotes, adds: "These subreddits man. Getting banned even for genuinely trying to have a conversation and gather feedback."

Automation makes it worse, not better. One founder in the corpus ran 200 pitching direct messages on Reddit and got 1 reply, a 0.5 percent rate, and reports that trying to automate the sending got the account banned outright. A separate commenter on the same theme put the mechanism plainly: "reddit users are pretty good at sniffing out templated responses." Another founder, describing the one Reddit playbook in the entire corpus that produced real results, states the constraint directly: "Do not use AI to write it. People notice and you lose them immediately." The tool can help someone track a conversation. It cannot write the reply and stay welcome.

Then there is a harder claim, aimed straight at the premise. A comment sitting at 15 upvotes on a post asking where to find complaining customers reads: "in my experience you never find tens of threads full of people complaining about something because a saas to fix that would be created way sooner than the signals become so evident." Another reply on the same thread: "this method is dead in 2026." A separate founder, searching Reddit for the exact kind of complaint FirstCustomer is built to surface, reports finding only a couple of matching posts, and that they were two to three years old, not live pain.

One more thing the corpus makes visible, which a keyword scorer would miss entirely: a real share of the posts asking "how do I find people with this problem" were themselves written by founders of competing discovery and lead-finding tools, using the question as a way into the thread. In the first shard alone we count roughly 10 of the 124 posts this way, and a second research pass across the wider set found at least 10 distinct named competitor products pitched inside threads that were nominally about someone else's discovery problem, including one instance where a founder's exact pitch, a tool that finds likely customers and drafts outreach, was removed by a moderator in the very type of thread it was pitching into. If a share of the pain data itself is marketing in disguise, the corpus is not just showing us the market, it is showing us the noise floor we have to filter before we can trust anything else in it.

What this means for how we build

We are not walking away from the bet. The part of the corpus that supports it is large and specific: people really are stuck on finding who to talk to, and the manual channels they try are producing single-digit reply rates and burning weeks. But the part of the corpus that argues against the Reddit-mining half of the pitch is not a rounding error. It is moderators enforcing a rule at scale, founders getting banned for the automated version of exactly what we do, and one of the corpus's own top comments calling the whole approach dead.

The honest response is to keep a human in the loop on every reply, never auto-post, and treat freshness as a hard filter rather than a nice-to-have, because a two-year-old complaint is not a live signal no matter how well it matches a keyword. It also means we should expect a real share of any Reddit-shaped market signal to be other builders pitching each other, and score for that instead of assuming every match is a customer.

We published a first post admitting our SEO instinct was wrong once we had the data. This is the same discipline applied to the product itself. The corpus that motivated FirstCustomer also contains the strongest argument against the exact channel it sells. We would rather publish that than pretend we did not read it.