What "Reddit lead generation" actually means
Every day, people post questions on Reddit that are really purchase decisions in disguise. "What do you use to track competitor pricing?" "Is there a tool that does X without the Y?" "Switching from Z, what should I look at?" The person asking has a budget, a deadline and a problem, and they've told a public forum exactly what it is. That's a lead. It's also a conversation, and the two facts are inseparable.
The version of Reddit lead generation that works is simple to describe: watch the subreddits where your buyers ask, notice the threads that fit your product, and answer them in a way that would be useful even if the reader never clicked anything. Your account, your words, your judgment about whether a mention of your product belongs there at all.
The version that doesn't work is also easy to describe, and a lot of tools sell it: scrape usernames, send templated DMs, or let an AI post comments under an account you rent. Communities recognise it within a comment or two, moderators remove it, and the product gets remembered for the wrong reason. ThauRed doesn't do any of that, and this page explains what it does instead.
What a buying-intent thread looks like
Not every mention of your category is an opportunity. ThauRed scores each new post on two things: relevance, how closely the problem in the thread matches what your product solves, and intent, how close the poster is to choosing something. A rant about a competitor scores lower than a request for recommendations; a request for recommendations in a subreddit that welcomes them scores highest.
High score
Relevant · high intent
"Looking for a way to keep an eye on r/SaaS and r/startups for people asking about onboarding tools. Currently doing it by hand and missing most of it. What do you use?" A stated problem, a stated workaround, an explicit ask.
Medium score
Relevant · low intent
"Anyone else find Reddit exhausting for marketing? Feels like every subreddit has different rules." Right audience, real pain, but nobody asked for a tool. A helpful reply builds standing; a pitch would be noise.
Low score
Off-topic mention
"Reddit marketing is dead, change my mind." Category words, zero fit. ThauRed shows it if you ask, but it won't put it at the top of your list.
The examples above are illustrations, not real threads, but they're the shape of what the scanner finds every day. The point of scoring is that your attention goes to the first kind of thread first.
How ThauRed generates leads, end to end
- 01
Describe your product once
Pitch, audience, the pain points you solve, the tone you want to reply in. This is what every score and every draft is measured against.
- 02
Pick your subreddits from the catalog
ThauRed's subreddit catalog maps each community's rules, culture and tolerance for self-promotion, so you start in places where a useful answer is actually welcome. One project space per product, each with its own list.
- 03
The extension scans on a cadence
A lightweight Chrome extension reads your subreddits for new posts and hands them to the scorer. It reads; it never writes.
- 04
Opportunities arrive scored
Each post shows its relevance and intent, why it fits, and which subreddit rules apply. You can skip anything, and skips teach the scorer what you don't want.
- 05
A draft in your voice
For each opportunity ThauRed drafts a reply tuned to the subreddit's tone and your product's pitch. Helpful first; promotional only when it genuinely belongs.
- 06
You read, edit, and post
The final word is yours, every time. Mark it done and ThauRed tracks the engagement against that project so you can see what's working.
Manual search vs keyword alerts vs a scored feed
| Manual Reddit search | Keyword alerts | ThauRed | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finds new threads | When you remember to look | Every time a word matches | Every scan, across all your subreddits |
| Filters by fit | Your eyes, every time | No. A word is a word | Relevance and intent score per post |
| Knows the subreddit's rules | If you've read them | No | Catalog notes on rules and self-promotion tolerance |
| Drafts the reply | No | No | Yes, in your voice |
| Posts for you | No | No | No, and it never will |
| Cost | Hours a week | Free (F5Bot) to $30+/mo | Free for 2 scans, then $19/mo |
Keyword alerts are the right tool if you only need to know when your brand or a competitor is mentioned. F5Bot does that free, and we'd rather you use it than pay us for the wrong job. See our Reddit monitoring tool page for the distinction.
Does it post for you? No. Here's what happens instead.
Nothing is ever posted from your account without you pressing the button. ThauRed drafts; you decide. There's no "auto-publish" toggle to accidentally leave on, no queue that fires while you sleep, and no option for us to post as you. That's a product decision, not a missing feature.
Three reasons. First, Reddit's rules and every subreddit's moderators treat automated engagement as spam, and the account that gets removed is yours, not the tool's. Second, communities can tell. A reply that's ninety percent right and ten percent tone-deaf costs more credibility than no reply. Third, the whole value of the channel is that the answer came from a person who understood the question. Remove the person and you've removed the value.
What you get instead is speed at the part that's slow, reading and judging, and control at the part that matters, speaking.
Build standing before you pitch
A brand-new account whose first ten comments all mention the same product reads as promotion, whatever the words say. ThauRed's contribution planner paces a small number of genuinely helpful comments a day in the communities you've chosen, on threads where you have something to add and no reason to sell. By the time a high-intent thread appears, you're a name people have seen being useful.
This is the unglamorous half of Reddit lead generation and the half most tools skip. It's also why the leads that come this way convert: the person you're talking to has context on who you are.
What it costs
Free
$0 · no card
Two scans across your Personal space and your first project. AI-scored opportunities, the contribution planner and reply drafting are all included. Enough to see whether your subreddits have the threads you hope they do.
Pro
$19/mo or $190/yr · 7-day trial
Unlimited scans across every project, unlimited scored opportunities, the planner in every space, priority support. The trial requires a card and cancels in one click from the billing portal.
Prices as of September 4, 2026 and identical to the pricing section and checkout. No per-lead fees, no per-comment fees, no seats.
Who it's for, and who it isn't
- For: founders and small teams marketing one or a few products, who can spend fifteen minutes a day replying well and want the finding and drafting done for them.
- For: anyone who used GummySearch to find customers and wants the same discovery with scoring and drafts on top. See GummySearch alternatives.
- Not for: agencies that need volume posting across many client accounts, DM campaigns, or brand-mention tracking across the whole web. Those are different products, and we list the good ones on the comparison page.
Start free with two scans, no card. If the first scan doesn't show you a thread worth answering, you've lost ten minutes and nothing else.