Show HN: Track live mentions of any keyword on any forum + Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Track live mentions of any keyword on any forum + Twitter

forumscout.app

6 pointsjoshwaller74 comments

Hey HN! My name's Josh and I'm the sole founder of ForumScout.

I had the idea for this project about 3 months ago, and I've been building it ever since.

ForumScout notifies you whenever your chosen keyword(s) are mentioned on ANY forum or Twitter thread.

For example, let's say you own a SaaS that generates AI headshots. You could get notified when someone mentions "AI headshot", and offer them a free trial of your service.

There are many ways I believe a tool like this can be useful, but a few of the obvious ones are:

- Respond to mentions of your brand/website in real time.

- Find people who mention keywords related to your niche, and engage with potential customers.

- Monitor mentions of your competition, and pick the right moments to offer your alternative.

- Get creative. You can track live mentions of literally anything, anywhere on the internet.

When new posts are found, they will be added to the feed in your dashboard. Email notifications are optional, but will help you engage much faster.

Data is pulled from various different real-time Forum APIs, as well as a few native platform APIs, like Reddit.

I also built a free search engine so you can search for past mentions if you don't need live ones: https://forumscout.app/search

The search engine works differently from the live service, so it might miss quite a few posts - the live service doesn't miss any.

Right now, there's a 2 week free trial that lets you setup 5 of these automations for free.

If you'd like a longer trial period, please email me at josh@forumscout.app and I'd be more than happy to extend it for you in return for your feedback:)

If it sounds like something you're interested in, I'd be extremely grateful to hear your thoughts. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.

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Hey Josh, this is a really neat idea! I can definitely see the value in real-time forum and Twitter monitoring, especially for brand reputation management and lead generation. A few thoughts and questions: Scalability: With so many forums and the real-time aspect, how do you handle data processing and ensure timely notifications without delays? Filtering: False positives could be a pain. How robust is the keyword matching, and are there options for filtering by sentiment, forum quality, or specific user profiles? Integrations: Down the line, integrations with popular marketing/CRM tools would be super valuable (e.g., pushing leads into a CRM). Any plans for this? I'm curious about the technical side too. Combining various forum APIs and handling the data firehose must be quite the challenge. Did you build any custom scraping/parsing solutions?

Thank you very much :)

Scalability: This is more of a cost/resource issue than a technical one. Right now, ForumScout checks every hour for new posts. This isn't ideal, but it allows me to offer the product for much cheaper than if we were to check, say, every 5-10 minutes. Scalability is much more manageable with an hourly check, but the goal eventually is to get as close to real time as possible. I plan on offering a higher pricing tier for real-time checks to account for the extra resources.

Filtering: By default, the searches are performed via exact match. From testing, there are no false positives; there's some code that double-checks that each post contains an exact match of the keyword(s). Users can manually turn off exact match if they want broader searches. Sentiment searching is a VERY good idea. I will add it to my list!

Integrations: This is a great point, and something I had not yet considered. Right now, the feed can be exported via CSV, but direct integrations would be much better for UX.

Technical: Honestly, it wasn't too difficult - every hour, the automation will make a call to all the different APIs and search using the parameters provided by the user at setup. Then we format and combine all the results, remove duplicates, perform some more filtering (depending on what settings the user has chosen), and add the results to the user's feed. If emails are turned on, we send an email with the new results. As mentioned, making this real-time will be more difficult, but it would really just mean doing this every few minutes, requiring more resources. I did build a custom scraping function for Reddit comments, because the native Reddit API doesn't allow direct searching of comments like you can on their website/app, but everything else is third-party.

Awesome

isnt the twitter api super expensive? how did you get around that?

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