Get real time alerts on selected “keywords” to your inbox, Slack and Discord
to never miss a relevant Reddit thread again.
Free for now, no limits, no credit card
Type in topics of interest, your competitors or your brand to set a new keyword watchdog.
Btw scoping by specific subreddits gives you more relevant results!
We will be watching for any mention of your KWs in posts, comments, usernames or URLs.
EVERY. SINGLE. ONE!
To email, Slack or Discord. Not enough? Build with our webbhooks.
That way you are always on top of relevant conversations!
Early-stage growth is hard. It's hard for product builders, content creators, and entrepreneurs. It consists of building a product that solves burning problems in a specific niche. And being able to distribute it there.
In the past eight years, we've often failed at that. Having 10 user calls or betting on 100 signups is not enough.
Early-stage growth feels like you should do 1000 things yet neither of them will make you go 🏒. It's easy to give up and focus on building the product in your cocoon, not being challenged by the market.
But that's the worst way to build a strong product. You must be in the problem space, listening to every conversation, and testing your hypothesis every day. You have to provide value to the community and plug your product at the right time.
That's a lot of manual work. That's what inspired us to build Surfkey. We wanted to be on top of every relevant conversation to help us learn about the field, listen to people's struggles, offer them a good solution and learn what they think about it.
So, who is Surfkey for? IndieHackers, startup founders, hustlers, and creators who experienced the challenges of growth firsthand and who believe the way to build a great product is to be in touch with the customers and the market as much as possible. As well as that early-stage growth is full of grind and showing up every day to lay another brick.
TL;DR
Surfkey is a Reddit keyword alert tool to help you grow organically by listening, providing value, and sharing your stuff in relevant subreddits.
People say that getting the first customers is the hardest. We actually use Surfkey to grow Surfkey and it played a big part in getting our first 250 users.
Imagine always being part of relevant conversations on Reddit and easily finding people who are trying to figure out the problem you're solving with your product. Almost feels like a cheat code. Sure, it's not a strategy that scales the most but first customers lead to feedback. Feedback leads you to calculated iterations. And who knows...? Maybe the iterations will lead you to your PMF.
Coming up with an original idea is nearly impossible. It feels like nowadays there's an existing product for literally anything. So the best strategy is to build something which already exists and make it 10x better.
That's easier said than done though… What helped us in the past though was diving deep into communities and seeing what people think. What they love about those competitors, what's annoying, what they would like to improve.
Social listening is powerful. To make your product 10x better, you need to hear all of that.
Backlinking your pages on Reddit can be one of the fastest and easiest sources of SEO juice. Find relevant conversations, provide value and at the end hyperlink a relevant page. One important thing - always make sure to include the main keyword in the hyperlink. This is an SEO strategy used by every successful startup.
Get SEO backlinksBecoming a part of the community is an extremely valuable thing. It can really help you understand the people in your market and become a “thought leader” (I know, I hate that term too, but used it for lack of a better one). By always being present, answering people’s questions and plugging your stuff at the right time, you will become part of the community. Truly.
Become a "thought leader"Real-life example of something stupid we did in the past: We had Welder - a simple tool for recording video podcasts remotely. There were some reasons at the time to make it a native app but it turned out to be a huge misstep.
Why? People were recording podcast interviews with one-time guests and it was nearly impossible to make all of them download an app just for that one interview. This feedback was so frequent that we had to move it to the browser…
Looking back it's so obvious but at the time we needed the users to tell us. If we just read a few threads on Reddit, we would 100% make it a browser app from the beginning as people always list it as the number one requirement for podcast recording apps.
This becomes even more useful later down the road once your brand is a bit more established and known in the space but it’s something that can’t be underestimated even for early-stage startups.
I know, it can be a bit scary to see someone mention you on Reddit and other social media but it’s most likely going to be a feel good comment or something which you can address or use as valuable feedback.
That’s a win win in my book.
Yep, that’s the idea with Surfkey! Once you pick out your keywords you will start getting mails in your inbox whenever one of the keywords appear on any subreddit.
Super simple, you just sign up to Surfkey with your email and start with keywords in your niche and problem space.
You can. Reddit allows you to do a very simple keyword search with some basic boolean functions included but it’s famously not very reliable. That’s also part of the reason why we set up Surfkey - to never miss a mention of a keyword that is important to us.
If you’re a starting hustler, entrepreneur, product builder or content creator you need to dive deep into your niche and really understand (and become part of) the space. This is something you shouldn’t ever compromise on. Surfkey helps you find relevant conversations to either listen or pitch in.
