How to find where your buyers actually talk
Your customers are already discussing your problem somewhere public. Here is how to find those venues, read their rules, and show up without getting removed.
Every business has a handful of places where its buyers already talk about the problem it solves. Most founders can name two of them at most.
Ask where your customers hang out and you'll usually hear "LinkedIn" and "Twitter", sometimes a subreddit. Those are the places everyone names, which is exactly why they're the most crowded, and as it turns out, not always the most useful.
Start from the problem, not the platform
The instinct is to pick a platform first and then look for buyers on it. Try the reverse. Start with the words a buyer types when the problem gets bad enough to search for help.
A property manager whose building permit has stalled doesn't search "project management software". They search "DOB violation how long to clear" or "expediter vs filing rep". Those searches lead you to the real venues: a city message board, a trade association group, a regional subreddit with a few thousand members, a comment thread under a two-year-old blog post that still ranks.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Older threads that rank for a question people keep asking go on bringing in readers for years, so a helpful reply there can outlast a post on a feed that scrolls away in an hour.
What we've learned about which platforms produce buyers
We run agents that look for exactly these conversations for Revtive's users, so we have some data on where they actually turn up. Between July and September 2026, across six workspaces, the agents searching Reddit came back empty 44% of the time, while the ones searching X came back empty 83% of the time, and Hacker News produced nothing usable in 46 runs. Those workspaces are mostly B2B software and services, so your mix may differ, but the gap was large.
LinkedIn taught us something more specific. When our agents searched it for people discussing a problem, they mostly surfaced people selling the solution. In one test, every one of the seven posts found was written by a cold-email vendor, because on LinkedIn the people posting about a problem are usually marketing their fix for it. The buyers were more often in the comments than in the posts. So if you're working LinkedIn, read the replies under posts, not just the posts themselves.
The places nobody lists
The most valuable venues are usually the ones that never appear in a "top 20 communities" article:
- Trade association communities, often on ancient software and full of decision-makers.
- City and regional groups, where local service businesses get chosen.
- Q&A sites and forums for the specific tool your buyers already use.
- Slack and Discord groups organised around a job rather than an industry.
- The comments under the two or three articles that rank for your core search.
They're small, and that's the point. A hundred-person community where everyone has the problem is worth more than a hundred-thousand-member subreddit where one in a thousand does. It's also where people ask the question that matters most, "can anyone recommend a...", and answering those well is how many small businesses find clients fastest.
Read the rules before you write anything
This is the step people skip, and it decides whether the rest was worth doing.
Every community has its own policy on self-promotion, and they vary a lot. Some ban links entirely, some allow them only in comments, some are fine with it if you say who you are, and some have an unwritten rule stricter than the written one, which you only learn by reading what got removed. A genuinely helpful post in the wrong venue can still be taken down, and in some places it'll cost you the account too.
So before you post, read the rules, the pinned posts and a week or two of threads. Notice whether anyone links to their own product, and what happened when they did.
Show up as the person who solved it
The posts that work aren't disguised ads. They're what you'd have written anyway if you'd solved the problem and wanted to save someone else the trouble.
A format that tends to earn replies: here was my situation, here's what I tried first, here's where each thing fell over, here's what finally worked, and here's what I'd do differently. Real numbers and real dead ends. No product name unless someone asks, and sometimes not even then.
A post like that builds something a link can't. People remember who was useful in a thread and come looking for them later.
Replying beats posting
Most people aim to publish their own posts. The better use of time is usually replying to threads where someone has already described the problem, and which threads count depends on who you've decided your customers are.
Someone asking "has anyone dealt with this?" has put their hand up. They've described their situation, said what they've tried, and asked for help. A reply that actually answers them arrives at exactly the right moment, and anyone who finds the thread through search later reads it too.
Search each venue for the words your buyers use, sort by newest, and answer the ones you can answer properly. Skip the ones where you'd be stretching.
How do you tell if community marketing is working?
Not by traffic, and increasingly not by clicks either, because search engines now answer many questions without sending anyone anywhere. Community work tends to show up first as conversations: someone messages you, someone mentions you in a thread you weren't in, someone arrives at your site already knowing what you do.
Give it a quarter before you judge it, then judge it honestly. If you've been active in a place for three months and nobody has ever replied, it's probably the wrong place. Go back to the searches and find a better one.
And if one of your venues turns out to be Reddit, it has its own rules and its own ways of removing you. Here's an approach that doesn't get you banned.