Someone asked for your product yesterday. You never saw the thread.
DETAIL · THE THREAD · CUSTOMER-FINDING TOOL · RESEARCH
General notes
- 01Founders find the thread three weeks late, when the asker has already chosen. The conversation happened in public. Nobody was listening.
- 02Searching one product name on a public forum's API returned 139,750 results with typo tolerance on. Almost all noise.
- 03Typo tolerance off, phrase in quotes: 348. The signal was always there, buried under a feature designed for a different job.
As posted
Someone asked for your product yesterday, in public, and you never saw the thread.
This is the founder problem I hear most, and I had it myself. You find the conversation three weeks late. The person who asked has already chosen. The reply you would have written is now an apology.
So I tried to build the listening. It turned out to be harder than the finding.
One example from a public forum's search API. I searched one product name with the engine's defaults. 139,750 results. Almost all noise, because typo tolerance was on and the engine was being helpful.
Typo tolerance off, phrase in quotes: 348 results. The signal was always there. It was buried under a feature designed for a different job.
Every source has a quirk like this. One API searches comments; another only searches posts. One needs a token or it throttles you; another blocks server networks entirely. Learning them, one at a time, is the unglamorous work behind "find the people already asking".
Sheet 033. The number on it is real, from a probe I ran in August, and it is the reason I stopped trusting default search settings anywhere.