When I asked founders on Reddit what they were building and where they were struggling with distribution, people showed up with very different products.
A nutrition app. A tool for maintaining SaaS applications. An astrology product.
They shared an interest in building something and finding users. But the customers for those products would have very different reasons to gather online.
That distinction matters.
A founder community can be a useful place to get feedback, encouragement, or advice. Whether it is also a useful place to find customers depends on what you are building.
For Mangos AI, conversations about finding users are relevant to the problem we help with. For a nutrition app, the next useful conversation might happen somewhere entirely different.
So how do you find where your target audience hangs out online?
I would start with the problem they are trying to solve and follow the language they use to describe it.
1. Write down what someone would say before finding your product
Your product category is one way to search. It may not be how a potential customer describes their problem.
Someone looking for proposal software might talk about spending Sunday evening preparing quotes. Someone who needs help with distribution might say they launched a product but have no idea how to find people willing to try it.
Those descriptions give you different places to look.
For a product that helps freelancers prepare proposals, I would test searches such as:
- “How do you write proposals for clients?”
- “Spending too much time on quotes”
- “Client keeps changing the scope”
- “What do you use to send estimates?”
These are illustrative searches. I would replace them with wording from actual conversations as soon as I had it.
Start with a handful of phrases drawn from the problem, the current workaround, and the result someone wants. Search those phrases in a search engine and in communities that appear relevant.
Read enough of each result to understand who is speaking. A matching phrase alone tells you very little about whether the person needs your product.
If your customer description is still broad, the ideal customer profile guide can help you narrow it first.
2. Look for the activity around the problem
People can gather around a profession, a tool they use, a goal, or a stage of life.
Your product may help with one small part of that activity.
In the nutrition app conversation, the founder described building around needs she had experienced as a mother. That suggested a more specific direction to investigate than a general fitness audience.
It did not establish where those potential customers gathered. That would require another step: finding conversations, reading them, and checking whether the needs matched.
I would apply the same approach to a business product.
If you help small agencies manage client approvals, explore where agency owners discuss client work. Look for conversations about feedback, revision rounds, missed deadlines, and how decisions get made.
You may discover that people discuss the problem in a community named after their profession rather than your software category.
Reddit’s own audience research guidance similarly encourages looking at interests and conversation context alongside broad audience attributes.
The useful question is: what brings these people together, and where does your problem appear within that activity?
3. Read the replies before judging the community
A community description can sound perfect. The actual conversations may tell a different story.
I would read several recent discussions and their replies before deciding to spend time there.
Who asks the questions? Are they doing the work your product supports? Do they explain what they have tried? Do other members respond with useful detail?
A thread full of product links tells you something different from a discussion in which people compare how they handle the same recurring problem.
Also notice who participates.
A community about running an agency may include established owners, people planning to start, service providers, and people selling to agencies. Those are different groups, even when they use similar language.
I would rather leave this research with three conversations I understand than a long list of community names I have barely opened.
For each promising discussion, save the link and a short note explaining why it matters. That explanation forces you to be specific.
4. Give each place a clear purpose
Finding your audience somewhere does not automatically mean every kind of participation is welcome there.
Read the community rules and observe how members respond to questions, recommendations, and product mentions. If a rule is unclear, ask a moderator before posting.
Some places may be useful primarily for learning. Others may welcome detailed answers, demonstrations, or requests for feedback in designated threads.
I would record the role of each place in plain language:
This is where I learn how people describe the problem.
This is where I can answer questions I understand.
This is where people explicitly ask for tools or recommendations.
That helps you choose an appropriate action when you return.
It also keeps you from judging every community by immediate signups. A place that improves your understanding can still be useful, provided you know that is why you are spending time there.
5. Try a small research week
Before committing to a channel, I would give myself a week to investigate two or three promising places.
The aim would be to find several distinct conversations from people who plausibly match the customer profile.
For each one, I would record:
- What the person was trying to do.
- What made it difficult.
- What they had already tried.
- Whether I could contribute something useful.
- Whether this kind of conversation appeared regularly.
These are working notes, not proof that the channel will produce customers.
At the end of the week, ask where you learned the most and where you could participate consistently. If you found little relevant activity, revisit your search language and customer assumptions before deciding the audience is absent.
You can also ask people you already know: where did they last look for help with this problem? Which communities or publications do they return to?
Their answers give you another route to investigate.
6. Choose a place where you can contribute
It took me four weeks to find a Reddit post that drew the engagement I was looking for. Finding a relevant community was only part of the work. I still had to ask a question people wanted to answer and stay involved after they replied.
That is why I would evaluate your own ability to contribute alongside audience fit.
Can you answer some of the questions being asked? Can you share a useful example? Can you return often enough to continue a conversation?
This also shapes how I think about Mangos AI. A clearer description of the customer and their problem helps guide conversation discovery. The founder still needs to read the context and decide whether a response adds anything.
In the Reddit article, I explained why mentioning the product in every reply was never the intention. Finding the right people should help you understand and support them.
A business conversation may follow when the need and interest are there.
Start with one place worth returning to
The founders in my Reddit thread had a shared distribution challenge. Their products still needed different paths to customers.
Your own path becomes clearer when you can connect a specific customer, a recurring problem, and a place where that problem is discussed.
Start there. Read, contribute, and see what you learn. The 30 day distribution plan gives you a routine for continuing the work.
Where did your last potential customer go for help before they found you?