Hey HN! My name's Josh and I'm the sole founder of ForumScout.
I had the idea for this project about 3 months ago, and I've been building it ever since.
ForumScout notifies you whenever your chosen keyword(s) are mentioned on ANY forum or Twitter thread.
For example, let's say you own a SaaS that generates AI headshots. You could get notified when someone mentions "AI headshot", and offer them a free trial of your service.
There are many ways I believe a tool like this can be useful, but a few of the obvious ones are:
- Respond to mentions of your brand/website in real time.
- Find people who mention keywords related to your niche, and engage with potential customers.
- Monitor mentions of your competition, and pick the right moments to offer your alternative.
- Get creative. You can track live mentions of literally anything, anywhere on the internet.
When new posts are found, they will be added to the feed in your dashboard. Email notifications are optional, but will help you engage much faster.
Data is pulled from various different real-time Forum APIs, as well as a few native platform APIs, like Reddit.
I also built a free search engine so you can search for past mentions if you don't need live ones: https://forumscout.app/search
The search engine works differently from the live service, so it might miss quite a few posts - the live service doesn't miss any.
Right now, there's a 2 week free trial that lets you setup 5 of these automations for free.
If you'd like a longer trial period, please email me at josh@forumscout.app and I'd be more than happy to extend it for you in return for your feedback:)
If it sounds like something you're interested in, I'd be extremely grateful to hear your thoughts. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.
isnt the twitter api super expensive? how did you get around that?
Hey Josh, this is a really neat idea! I can definitely see the value in real-time forum and Twitter monitoring, especially for brand reputation management and lead generation. A few thoughts and questions: Scalability: With so many forums and the real-time aspect, how do you handle data processing and ensure timely notifications without delays? Filtering: False positives could be a pain. How robust is the keyword matching, and are there options for filtering by sentiment, forum quality, or specific user profiles? Integrations: Down the line, integrations with popular marketing/CRM tools would be super valuable (e.g., pushing leads into a CRM). Any plans for this? I'm curious about the technical side too. Combining various forum APIs and handling the data firehose must be quite the challenge. Did you build any custom scraping/parsing solutions?