I built LeadSynth AI to automatically find potential customers from Reddit conversations. Then
I had a crazy idea: what if I used it to promote itself?
The experiment: Instead of posting "Show HN" and hoping for the best, I fed LeadSynth AI its own use case: "Find founders struggling with customer acquisition and lead generation."
9 days later:
1,500+ visitors 30 active users Still working on converting to paid customers Zero cold emails sent Zero ads run
How it works:
You describe your product/solution, and it surfaces Reddit posts where people are discussing related problems. For LeadSynth, it found posts like:
"I've been manually checking 15 subreddits daily for 3 months looking for customers..." "Spending $2K/month on lead gen tools but still getting low-quality prospects" "Anyone know how to find people actually talking about problems my product solves?"
Instead of pitching, I'd join conversations with genuine advice, then casually mention the tool. The meta insight:
People don't buy products on Reddit - they buy outcomes. The tool finds conversations where people are already discussing pain points rather than interrupting them with ads.