Is daily build-in-public distribution actually worth it?
we post into 6 social platforms every day. our analytics just told us roughly 5 of our signups came from all of them combined. google and one job board brought the rest.
that is a genuinely uncomfortable number to look at, because the daily posting feels like the work.
so i'm asking people who've actually done it: is daily build-in-public distribution worth it for a product like ours, or are we performing for an empty room? where did YOUR first 50 users actually come from?
Curious what “distribution” means for you day-to-day. Are you mostly posting BIP updates, or also hunting Reddit/forum threads where buyers already describe the pain?
I’m testing ThreadScout: daily scored list of those threads (relevance + why matched). If Reddit is already in your mix and the hunt eats time, happy to map a free sample — need product one-liner + 3–5 subs you already check.
both, and the split is not close.
posting our own updates is the low yield half. the half that works is finding threads where someone is already describing the problem and adding one concrete thing nobody in that thread has said yet. one comment like that took about 62 points in fifteen hours for us, on a day when our own post in a different sub was downvoted to zero. same account, same day.
so the hunt is real and it does eat time, but the expensive part is not finding the threads. sorting by hot with a recency filter surfaces plenty of them in a couple of minutes. the expensive part is reading the existing top comments closely enough to know what has already been said, because the entire value of the deposit is in not repeating it. a scored relevance list would not save me that step, and that step is most of the cost.
if the scoring covered comment saturation rather than topical relevance, that would be a different product and i would look at it. something like: this thread is hot, and the obvious answer has already been given four times, so here is the angle still open. that is the part i currently do by hand.
This is really useful — thanks for spelling it out.
You’re right: topical relevance is the cheap part. The expensive part is “what’s already been said in the top comments, and what’s still open.” A scored list of threads doesn’t skip that.
Comment saturation / open-angle is the sharper job. If I mapped a sample that way for your niche (hot thread + “already said 4×” + one unused angle), would that be worth a look — or is that still something you’d rather do by hand because the judgment call is the whole skill?
By hand, and not because hand is better. Because the scoring step is where the whole thing either works or turns into slop, and I do not yet trust anything but reading to do it.
Concretely, the part I would not hand over: deciding whether the open angle is actually open or just unsaid because it is wrong. Those look identical in a scored list. A thread with four comments saying the same thing and one obvious gap usually has that gap for a reason, and the reason is normally that the gap is bad advice. A saturation score cannot see that. It can only see that nobody said it.
So the sample would be worth a look if it scored the second thing rather than the first. Hot thread plus already-said-4x is the cheap half and I can eyeball it in about a minute. What I cannot eyeball at volume is which of the unsaid angles is unsaid because it is wrong.
If you can show me a mapping where the open angle is ranked by whether it would survive a reply, rather than by whether it is absent, I would genuinely look at it. Do you have a way to score that, or does it bottom out in a human read too?
Fair challenge — and honest answer: I don’t have a reliable “survives a reply” score yet. Absence ≠ good angle; that still bottoms out in a human read for me too.
What I can do once: pick one hot thread in your niche, map already-said vs one angle I’d actually post, and note why I think it survives pushback. Not a product feed — one worked example.
you can take a look at our clinet digest to see what it is about: https://threadscout-theta.vercel.app/feed/03fcb90a-5bc8-4627-99a9-3f70f6a73ee6?date=2026-07-30
Want that, or leave it as a useful framing and move on?
yes, do the worked example. and thanks for saying the score does not exist yet instead of telling me it does. that answer is most of the reason i will actually read the output.
what you need from me:
one-liner: an agent that fills in and submits real job application forms on company ATS pages, and records what came back from the other side instead of marking it sent.
subs i actually check: r/jobsearchhacks, r/jobs, r/resumes, r/cscareerquestions. r/recruitinghell is read-only for us, they ban promo and they are right to.
one constraint that will make the example more useful to both of us. pick a thread that is at least twelve hours old with twenty plus comments, not a fresh one. fresh threads are easy because nothing has been said yet, and easy is exactly the case where a saturation score adds nothing. the case that would move me is a thread where the obvious answer is already sitting in the top three comments and you can still name what is open.
and a real question back, because i do not have an answer to it. saturation looks measurable in principle. embed the top comments, look for a gap in the space. but the gap that matters is not semantic distance from what has been said. it is whether the unsaid thing is unsaid because nobody thought of it, or unsaid because it is wrong and the thread already worked that out. i cannot tell those two apart automatically, and i suspect that is the genuinely hard part of what you are building rather than the scoring itself. how are you thinking about that one?