Here is a thing that happens to every founder doing Reddit lead gen, usually around month two.
You find a perfect post. Someone in r/SaaS describing your product's exact problem, in their own words, unprompted. You write a genuinely useful reply. They upvote it. Maybe they say "thanks, checking it out."
And then nothing.
They never signed up. They never emailed you. They just closed the tab and went back to work, and the single best lead of your week evaporated because Reddit gave you a conversation and no way to continue it.
That is not a Reddit problem. That is a missing second half.
The two channels are not rivals
Founders argue about this like it is a choice. Reddit person versus LinkedIn person. Inbound purist versus outbound bro.
They are doing different jobs.
Reddit is where people raise their hand. Nobody posts "our onboarding is a mess and we're bleeding trial users" as a marketing exercise. They post it because it is 11pm and they are frustrated. That is the highest quality buying signal on the open internet, and it is free.
But Reddit is pseudonymous by design. You get intent without identity. You know exactly what someone needs and you have no idea who they are, what company they work at, or whether they have a budget.
LinkedIn is the inverse. Total identity, near zero intent. You know someone's title, company, headcount, and funding round. You have no idea whether they woke up today caring about the thing you sell.
Run either one alone and you are working with half the picture. Reddit gives you the what. LinkedIn gives you the who. The play is connecting them.
The handoff, step by step
This is the whole thing. It is not complicated, it is just a discipline most people skip.
1. Capture the intent, not just the mention
Keyword alerts are the wrong altitude. "Reddit marketing" as a keyword will bury you in noise, and you will stop opening the tab by week three.
What you actually want is intent classification. A post asking "what is a good CRM" and a post saying "we are migrating off HubSpot next quarter, what are people using" are worth wildly different amounts of your time. The second one has a timeline and a trigger event.
This is the part SneakyGuy does. You paste your URL, it drafts your keywords and subreddits, then it scans and scores every match from 20 to 100 and tags it with an actual intent category: solution seeking, purchase intent, comparison, complaint. You work the top of the list instead of reading everything.
Full disclosure, obviously: that is our tool. Skip it if you want, the method still works with a spreadsheet and more of your evenings.
2. Reply on Reddit first. Always.
Do not skip to LinkedIn. This is the step that separates this from spam.
Answer the actual question. Solve their problem in the thread, for free, with no ask. If your product is genuinely the answer, mention it once, casually, the way you would mention a tool to a friend. If it is not the answer, say so and point them somewhere better.
You are not doing this to be nice. You are doing it because it is the only version that works. The public reply is what earns the private follow up.
3. Identify, do not unmask
Here is the line, and it matters.
You are not doxxing anyone. You are not cross referencing usernames to find someone's real identity. That is creepy, it violates Reddit's rules, and it will end your account and your reputation at the same time.
What you are doing is much more boring. People tell you who they are constantly. "We're a 12 person team." "I'm the founder of a design agency in Austin." "My VP of Sales wants us on Salesforce." Sometimes they just link their own site in a comment.
That is a company, a size, and a role, volunteered publicly. From there LinkedIn Sales Navigator finds the person in about forty seconds.
If they gave you nothing identifying, you get nothing. Move on. There are more posts.
4. Follow up with the thread as the opener
This is where most people ruin it by pasting their standard connection template.
Do not do that. You have something almost nobody in their inbox has: a real, specific, recent reason to be talking to them.
Bad:
Hi Sarah, I'd love to connect and share how we help SaaS companies improve retention!
Good:
Hi Sarah, you mentioned in r/SaaS last week that your trial to paid conversion dropped after the pricing change. I replied in the thread. I've watched three companies hit that exact wall and two of them fixed it the same way. Happy to send you what they did, no pitch.
The second one gets answered because it proves you were paying attention. You are not interrupting them, you are continuing a conversation they started.
5. Automate the boring half, not the human half
The follow up is where founders quietly give up, because doing it by hand means living in LinkedIn all day, and the second you get busy the whole system rots.
For the LinkedIn side, Omentir is what I would point you at. It is an AI sales agent that matches prospects against your ideal customer profile, sends the connection requests and follow ups from your own profile, and pulls every reply into one inbox sorted by intent. The part that matters most is the boring part: it paces sending and holds daily limits, which is the difference between a warm pipeline and a restricted account. The codebase is open source under MIT if you want to read exactly what it does on your behalf, and there is an MCP server, so you can drive it from Claude or ChatGPT.
Second disclosure, plainly: that card is a tool I recommend, not a paid placement. Go poke at it yourself before you believe either of us.
The rules that keep you alive on both platforms
Both of these channels punish volume. Not eventually. Immediately.
- Never paste the same message twice. On Reddit it gets you flagged as a shill. On LinkedIn it gets your account restricted. Both platforms are extremely good at detecting templates now.
- Reply publicly before you message privately. Every single time. No exceptions.
- One touch per person per channel. If they ignore the LinkedIn note, that is your answer. A second follow up buys you nothing and costs you the goodwill from the Reddit thread.
- Respect the daily caps. Twenty connection requests a day from an established account is fine. Two hundred gets you a permanent restriction and there is no appeal that works.
- Never mention that you found them on Reddit if they were not obvious about who they are. If you had to work to identify them, do not contact them. Simple test.
Why this compounds and single channel does not
Pure Reddit gives you volume with no follow through. You have great conversations and can only convert the small fraction of people motivated enough to click through on their own.
Pure LinkedIn outbound gives you reach with no relevance. Your reply rate sits somewhere between one and three percent, and you burn through your entire addressable market inside a quarter.
Pairing them fixes the specific weakness in each. Every Reddit thread you answer becomes a warm, specific, timely reason to reach out. Every LinkedIn message carries proof that you already helped this person once, for free, before you asked for anything.
Reply rates on that kind of follow up are not in the same category as cold outbound. They are not even close.
Real talk
Neither tool does the work.
Software can surface the conversation and handle the mechanics of the follow up. It cannot make you someone worth replying to. If your Reddit comments are thinly veiled ads, better targeting just means you get ignored more efficiently.
The founders who win at this are the ones who would have been useful in those threads anyway. The tooling only means they stop missing the threads, and stop losing the person the moment the tab closes.
Start with one channel. Get genuinely good at being helpful there. Then add the second half.
If you are running both and want to compare notes on what is working, I am always up for that conversation. That is sort of the whole point.