How to Find Customers on Reddit in 2026 (Without Getting Banned)

Reddit is the one place where your future customers write down their problem in full, in public, before they've picked a tool. They explain what they tried, what it cost them and what they wish existed. Then they ask strangers what to buy.

Finding customers on Reddit comes down to three jobs: find those posts within hours, pick the ones that fit what you sell, and reply with something useful. For years a tool did the finding. Several of those tools have stopped working, GummySearch among them, so this is the playbook I run now: the manual method first, then the agent that does the searching for me every morning.

I recorded the whole thing as a 10-minute walkthrough if you'd rather watch: GummySearch for Reddit Is Gone: This New AI Agent Finds Me Reddit Customers Now.

Why Reddit is still the best place to find early customers

Three reasons it beats most channels for a product nobody has heard of yet.

• People describe the problem in detail. A LinkedIn profile tells you a job title. A Reddit post tells you what broke last Tuesday, what they tried and what they're willing to pay to make it stop.
• They ask for recommendations in public. You don't have to guess at intent. "Anyone using something for this?" is the intent.
• A good reply keeps working. The person who asked reads it first. After that, everyone who finds the thread through Google reads it too, sometimes for years.

That last point is where the clicks come from. You don't need a post of your own to go viral. You need useful replies under posts from people describing your problem.

What a buying signal looks like

Most posts in a subreddit are not signals. These four types are, and each example below is a real post my agent found. I've left out usernames.

Signal type	Real example	Subreddit
Asking for a tool	"Anyone automating invoice reminders without Zapier?"	r/automation
Describing the pain	"Who pays for the 2am question? The solo founder, one cancelled account at a time."	r/SaaS
Looking for a vendor or partner	"Looking for design partners among agencies and automation builders running client pipelines"	r/AI_Agents
A change that creates a need	"Two of our longest serving ops people leave next year. Any AI for operations teams that helps keep what they know?"	r/automation

The first type is the obvious one, and everyone chases it. The other three are where there's less competition. Someone describing a pain hasn't started shopping yet, so a helpful reply is often the first one they get. A change (people leaving, a new hire, a tool being shut down) creates a need with a deadline attached.

One more from the same morning: "Anyone automated real time guidance for support reps during live calls?" That's a tool request so specific that the right vendor could answer it in two sentences.

Find your subreddits first

Before you search for posts, decide where to look. Member count is the least useful number. Check these instead:

• Activity. Do new posts get real answers within a few hours, or sit at zero comments for days?
• Self-promotion rules. Some subreddits ban it outright, some allow it in a weekly thread, some allow it if you disclose. It's in the sidebar.
• Link rules. Plenty of subs remove any comment with a link from a new account, whatever the link is.
• Who is posting. You want buyers describing problems. A sub full of other founders promoting to each other is a poor place to look.

Ten well-chosen subreddits beat fifty big ones. In the video, one prompt gave me a ranked tracker of 30 subreddits where my audience hangs out, and I work the top of that list.

Why the old tools stopped working

If you used GummySearch for this, you already know. It closed to new sign-ups on November 30, 2025. Its closing notice says the product is "shutting down to comply with Reddit's API policies, which forbid commercial applications". Existing subscribers kept access to the end of their billing period, up to a year, and lifetime-deal holders have until November 30, 2026. More than 140,000 founders, marketers and investors had used it.

Building your own replacement got harder at about the same time. On November 11, 2025, Reddit ended self-service access to its data API and introduced the Responsible Builder Policy. Anyone who wants to build on Reddit data now has to request approval first.

GummySearch was a good product and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It made audience research on Reddit fast for a lot of people. The method below is what I replaced it with.

The manual method

You can do this by hand in about 30 minutes a day.

1. Open each of your subreddits and sort by New.
2. Search inside the sub for the phrases buyers use: "anyone using", "looking for", "alternative to", "how do you handle", plus the words for your problem.
3. Open anything from the last 24 hours that matches one of the four signal types.
4. Save the good ones in a sheet with the link, the signal type and a note on fit.
5. Reply to the best three or four while they're fresh.

It works. It's also the kind of job you stop doing in week two, because the searching is dull and the good posts turn up at hours when you're asleep.

Run it every morning with an agent

This is the part I handed over. I use Orbit, which is where you create AI agents to do your marketing and sales work. You describe a job in a sentence, and an agent shows up ready to do it, with the tools it needs already built in.

	By hand	With an agent
Finding posts	You search each sub yourself	It searches Reddit and X for you
Picking the ones that fit	You read and judge every post	Ranked by fit, in tiers
Keeping track	A sheet you update	A tracker it fills in
How often	When you remember	Every morning, on a schedule
Replying	You	Still you

The workflow from the video, step by step:

1. Describe what you sell, once. One or two sentences about the problem you solve and who has it.
2. The agent searches Reddit and X for people describing that problem.
3. It ranks them by fit, in tiers, and saves them to a tracker with the link and the reason each one made the list.
4. You put it on a daily schedule, so new posts are waiting every morning.
5. You reply while the post is fresh.

What that looked like in the recording:

• 14 potential customers from one simple query.
• A ranked tracker of 30 subreddits where my audience hangs out.
• 8 Reddit searches running at once for hiring-intent posts, in the same session.

The moment that surprised me: I never told it what I sell. It already knew my business from what I'd told Orbit before, so the first set of results was already filtered for my kind of customer.

Two limits worth stating. Orbit reads public posts and never posts on Reddit for you, so every reply is one you write and post yourself. And an agent finds and ranks. It doesn't replace the judgment of reading a thread before you answer it.

If you'd rather run the same idea on a different channel, I wrote up the LinkedIn version of this playbook. And if this becomes one of several agents you run, how to manage multiple AI agents as a solo founder covers keeping them pointed the same way.

How to reply and avoid the patterns that get accounts banned

This section is first-hand. We lost two Reddit accounts learning it.

• Read each subreddit's rules before you post. Many business and startup subs auto-filter new accounts, whatever you write.
• On a new account, don't post at first. Read, upvote, and comment rarely, only when the comment is useful on its own.
• No filler. One-line comments like "makes sense!" on a young account are the pattern that got ours shadowbanned. It was a new account, automation and low-value comments stacked together.
• Never automate posting from a young account.
• Answer the question first. Mention your product only if the sub allows it and it solves what they asked. A reply that would still be useful with your product name removed is the right kind.

Shadowban or just a filter? Look at your own comments. If strangers can see them, vote on them and reply, you aren't shadowbanned, even if a moderator removed one of your posts. If nothing you post gets any views or replies anywhere, the problem is sitewide.

None of this guarantees an account stays healthy. It's how you avoid the patterns that get accounts actioned.

Start tomorrow morning

Pick ten subreddits, learn the four signal types and reply to three posts a day. That alone will get you conversations with people who have your problem.

When the searching becomes the bottleneck, hand it to an agent. Orbit's Lead Finder agent runs the workflow above on a schedule and has the new posts waiting when you sit down. It's free to start, with 100 credits and no card. Build the AI empire that runs with you, the operating system for Claude, Codex, ChatGPT and more.

Find your first Reddit customers with the Lead Finder agent.