You know how they say the best products come from scratching your own itch?
Well, that's exactly what happened with Redreach.
The Helpkit marketing problem
For context, I've been building Helpkit (a Notion to help center tool) for a while now. It's my main project and I needed to find customers somehow.
I discovered that Reddit was actually a goldmine for this. I'd find relevant posts where people were asking for help with documentation or support systems, then jump in with genuinely helpful advice.
The key was being subtle. I wasn't spamming "hey check out my product" everywhere. I was actually helping people and naturally mentioning Helpkit when it made sense.
It worked surprisingly well.
The F5bot frustration
To scale this approach, I started using F5bot - this free Reddit keyword tracker tool. The idea was great: get notified when people mention certain keywords so I could jump into relevant conversations.
But holy crap, the false positives were driving me insane.
Every single day I'd get a bunch of notifications that were completely irrelevant. The tool just couldn't understand context at all. It was like having a very eager but very dumb assistant.
So I built an internal version just for Helpkit. Something that would scan Reddit but use AI to actually understand whether a post was worth my time or not.
A Night and day difference!
The Google revelation
Then something interesting happened. Google bought access to Reddit's data in this massive deal.
Suddenly, Reddit posts started ranking incredibly high for almost everything. Search for "best SEO tool" or "fitness tracker app" and you'd see Reddit threads right at the top of Google results.
I had this moment where I was like - wait, what if I could find these high-ranking Reddit posts systematically?
Think about it. Instead of trying to rank your own website for "best SEO tool" (good luck with that), you could just be present in the Reddit thread that's already ranking #2 on Google.
Way easier path to eyeballs, also AI search engines source their data from SERPs and most LLMs even train their data on Reddit (even if they won’t admit it anymore).
So that’s how the idea for Redreach got started.
Building multiple products
This is why I always have multiple projects going. Ideas come from using your own stuff and hitting real problems.
With Helpkit, I hit the Reddit marketing problem. That led to Redreach.
Who knows what problem Redreach will reveal that becomes the next product?
The best part? I'm using Redreach for all my projects now, including Helpkit. It finds relevant posts way faster than I could manually. Finally solved my own frustrating problem.
Sometimes the best business ideas are just fixing something that annoys the hell out of you every day. If you are curious in the interview above with Dago I also briefly go over why building multiple products helps me stay away from burnouts in case you are curious. I have a lot of thoughts about this and will write some stuff down in more detail soon.
