If you have ever tried to "listen" across Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub Discussions, Lobsters, and Dev.to at the same time, you already know the problem: there is too much. The firehose never stops, and most of it has nothing to do with you or your product.
The instinct is to check more feeds, set up more alerts, cast a wider net. But that is exactly the wrong move. Wider nets catch more fish — and more driftwood.
The volume trap
A typical developer-focused SaaS might track a dozen subreddits, the "Show HN" feed, a few GitHub topic tags, and a handful of Lemmy communities. That is thousands of posts per day. Reading them all is impossible. Skimming them produces FOMO. And FOMO fuels the cycle of refreshing feeds instead of doing the work.
The platforms themselves make it worse. Reddit wants you to keep scrolling. Hacker News wants you to keep refreshing. The UX of every community is designed to maximise attention, not to surface what matters.
More volume, less signal
Most keyword-based monitoring tools make things worse, not better. A mention of your product name in a random subreddit is not necessarily signal. A "How do I do X?" post where your product is a perfect fit — and nobody has mentioned it yet — is the real kind of signal. But it is harder to find, because it does not contain a keyword you already know.
Signal is not just volume. Signal is relevance plus intent. A post where someone is asking for a solution you provide, switching from a competitor, or complaining about a pain point you solve is worth far more than a drive-by mention.
How we think about it
Signalstac inverts the approach. Instead of trying to read everything and filter, we let an AI agent browse each community the way a human would — in a real browser, on a cadence, reading threads end to end. It scores each one for relevance and intent. What comes out is not a feed. It is a short queue of threads worth your time, each with a note on why it matters and a draft to get you started.
The mental model is not a monitoring dashboard. It is an inbox. The same way you check your email rather than refreshing an endless stream of everything in the world.
We started here
Signalstac was born from this exact frustration. The co-founders were running developer marketing at two different SaaS companies, and both of us had the same weekly ritual: spend Monday morning clicking through a dozen tabs, book mark three or four threads, draft replies, and lose the rest of the week to "keeping an eye" on places where customers were talking.
So we built the tool we wanted: something that does the browsing and filtering, and leaves us with just the conversations worth joining.
The feed is noise. Signalstac is the part worth answering.
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Notes on building Signalstac, developer marketing, and community engagement — sent roughly every two weeks.
