To use Reddit search to find people ready to buy, search inside one subreddit at a time for the phrases people type when they want a recommendation, sort the results by new, and read only the threads from the last few days. Buying questions are short and predictable, and a ten-minute daily check turns up more of them than you'd expect.
This is the hands-on version: what a buying question looks like, which phrases to search, how to narrow the search, and how to decide whether a thread is worth your reply. The example is Elena, who runs a small mobile bike repair business and works in a mid-sized city.
What a buying question looks like
A person ready to buy usually does four things in their post: they describe a specific problem, they mention a constraint (time, budget, location), they ask for a recommendation or a price, and they sound a little stressed. Compare these two:
"What's the best way to learn about bike maintenance?"
"Rear derailleur snapped on my commute today. I live near the east side and can't get to the shop before they close. Anyone know a mobile mechanic who can look at it this weekend?"
The first is curiosity. The second is a customer. It names a problem, a place, a deadline and a request for a person. You are looking for the second kind: posts that include a place, a time and a "who do I call". Everything else is background reading.
Search phrases that work
Start with a small set of phrases and run them in each community you watch. These are common ways people ask for help:
- "recommend" or "recommendation" with your trade, such as "bike mechanic recommendation"
- "anyone know a good" with the trade
- "looking for" with the trade or the job
- "who do you use for" with the service
- "how much should" or "how much does" with the job, which finds people about to be quoted
- "alternative to" or "switching from", when you sell something people leave
- "worth it" and "ripped off", when buyers are nervous about price
Quote marks keep words together. Reddit's search also supports some operators, such as limiting to a subreddit or searching titles only, and the options can change, so look at Reddit's search help for the current list. Another route is a web search with "site:reddit.com" in front of your phrase, which sometimes finds threads Reddit's own search misses, though it favors older ones.
If your first results look off, adjust the words. Customers write "mobile mechanic", "come to me", "fix my bike", "tune-up", rarely "bicycle maintenance service". Read ten threads and copy their wording into your searches.
Sort by new, not top
The default sorting puts old, popular threads first, and those are no use to you. A thread from two years ago that scored well is closed for new comments (Reddit archives threads after about six months) and the person has long since fixed the derailleur. Change the sort to new, and where available set the time filter to the past week or month.
New results are less polished, with more noise, and that's fine. You're skimming titles for ten minutes, not reading them all. A fresh thread with no replies is the best kind: a stressed person is refreshing the page, and a clear, helpful answer in the first hour is noticed.
Narrow to one subreddit
Search the whole site and you'll drown. Use the option to search within a community, or start from that community's page and use its search box. Run the same handful of phrases in each of your three to five communities. Searching one at a time also lets you apply that community's rules, which differ a great deal on whether business owners may answer. Check them first, as how to find the right subreddits for your business explains.
City and trade searches
Local buyers mention their place. Add the city, a neighborhood or a landmark: "bike" with "east side", "mobile mechanic" with your city name, or "plumber" with a suburb. Do the same with common local abbreviations. Elena would search her city's subreddit for "bike" and "bicycle", and the neighboring suburb's community for the same.
Local posts also tend to appear in several places, such as the city sub, a commuter or cycling sub, and a neighborhood one. Searching each with the same phrase finds the thread where the right people are watching.
Save the search and check it daily
Reddit lets you bookmark a search results page, so you can bookmark one per community and phrase set. Put them in a browser folder called "Reddit leads" and open them as a group each morning. Ten minutes: scan titles, open the three that look real, and skip the rest. Anything you answer, log in a sheet with the link and date, so you don't answer the same thread twice and so you can come back to it. How to run that routine is also covered in how to find people asking for recommendations online, which adds places beyond Reddit.
If you want the habit to last, tie it to something you already do, like your first coffee. Searching sporadically is where this stalls. A reasonable cap is twenty minutes a day, including writing, so it never swallows the day.
Score threads by age and answers
When you open a candidate, score it quickly:
- Age: under a day is best, a few days is fine, over a couple of weeks is rarely worth it.
- Answers: no answers or one weak one means an opening. Ten answers, one of them accepted, means the question is closed.
- Fit: right place, right job, right budget. If any of the three is off, skip it.
- Rules: the community allows business owners to answer, with disclosure.
Two or three threads that pass all four are a good day. Skipping the rest is normal. How to find your ideal customers will sharpen the "fit" test by getting you clear on who you want.
A ten-minute morning, start to finish
Here is what a real session might look like for Elena. At 7:40 she opens her bookmarked folder. The city subreddit search for "bike" sorted by new shows eleven results from the past week. Nine are not for her: a thread about a stolen bike, a route question, a post about new bike lanes. Two look right. One is a rider asking where to get a flat fixed before Saturday, posted yesterday, with one reply that suggests a shop across town. The other is eight days old, with a happy ending marked in the title.
She opens the first. The poster is in her area, the one existing reply doesn't mention anyone who comes to you, and the community's rules allow owners to answer with a disclosure. She writes three sentences on what to check (tube size printed on the tire sidewall, whether the valve is Presta or Schrader), says she runs a small mobile repair business, and offers to answer follow-ups here. Two minutes. She logs the link, date and subreddit in her sheet and moves on to the neighboring suburb's community, where nothing qualifies. Total time: nine minutes, one reply, no link posted.
Multiply that by a normal week and she answers perhaps four or five threads. If one in ten turns into a job at a typical repair price, that is a few extra jobs a month from nine minutes a day. Those are made-up numbers for illustration. Your own log will give you real ones.
When you'd rather not do the searching
The searching is the part that wears people down. Conversations, inside Rocketship, runs this search for you. It looks for Reddit threads where people ask for what you sell, filters out old and closed ones, and drafts a reply and a message in your voice, which you review and post yourself from your own Reddit account. It never posts, messages or votes for you. You can also give it the subreddits and keywords you want watched, which is your list from this article.
Reddit is one way to find people who already want what you sell. The ones who do not post anywhere are found by name. Build a list without buying one covers that, and outbound that reads the reply covers what to do when answers start arriving.
Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required. The AI workers page shows which one does which job.