That's me on a beach in southern New Zealand where I'm from, with a shirt that says New Zealand in Estonian where I live 🇪🇪!
I'm the solo founder behind RedditMentions — a simple tool that monitors Reddit for keywords and sends you email alerts when people are talking about topics that matter to your business. With RedditMentions, I built the tool for others I wish I'd had years ago.
The idea for this tool came while I was working in growth marketing at a SaaS company called Katana. Every day, I'd spend around 30 minutes manually searching Reddit for keywords like "ERP," "MRP," and "inventory management" in subreddits such as r/shopify and r/smallbusiness. I was looking for conversations where I could naturally recommend Katana. It was a pilot project to see if Reddit could be a new channel for us.
It worked — I found great threads and opportunities — but after two weeks, I gave up. The process was just too time-consuming to do manually. I remember thinking: if this could be automated, it would be worth it.
Some months later after learning a bit of Python (coding), I built a local script to do exactly that. It worked, and pulled in the conversations I cared about direct to a dedicated the company Slack channel. I worked so well and was so easy to set up and use that I tweaked the script and used it at my next job too.
Turning this script into a product happened kinda randomly. I mentioned the script in a sprawling work chat to my friend Tom, and he immediately said, "That's really cool — lots of people would use that. Why not turn it into a product?". It was a bit of an aha moment, where I realised that maybe I could take this thing and make it something for the masses. That was the moment RedditMentions.com was born.
After turning my script into a functioning web-app, I asked 4 friends to beta test it. One of those friends, became my first paying user as he had a perfect use case for it. He's game developer with two popular titles on Steam — Haiku, the Robot and Rusty's Retirement. With RedditMentions, he's instantly alerted whenever his games are mentioned in popular gaming subreddits. Sometimes it's praise, sometimes it's criticism — but either way, he knows right away and can respond. Since then a few more people have found RedditMentions, but I still enjoy seeing every new signup come through and hearing from them why they like the tool and what their specific use-case is.
Today, I run RedditMentions because I love that it's useful to the people who use it. I love hearing feedback, making small improvements, and keeping the tool running smoothly. It's not a massive operation — it's just me, building something I hope people find helpful. If you try RedditMentions out and have any feedback, I'd be happy to hear from you at hello@redditmentions.com or directly via LinkedIn too.
— Kurt
Join hundreds of businesses already using RedditMentions to stay on top of their brand, competitors, and opportunities.