People seem to have a lot of feelings lately. Let’s look at how marketing tactics may be influencing those feelings.

Let’s dive in.

A popular nugget of wisdom circulating in Entrepreneurship-land is to use Reddit to source ideas for potential new products and services. Reddit is a great way to find free feedback on what people feel passionately about - but that is also the trap. Anyone can post their anger and frustration on Reddit but there is no data on whether people act on those feelings.

One example is the frustration vented by Asana users when Asana began to introduce AI-enabled features. You would have thought that Asana had committed genocide. If Reddit was the only source of market feedback, you would be applauded for concluding that Asana would be out of business in less than a year.

The results are the opposite. Quarterly growth, year over year, has increased steadily for the past 4 quarters. They achieved 9.9% growth in the recent quarter. What the heck? How is that possible?

So what is the value of Reddit? Ironically, some AI platforms look to Reddit as one of their sources of customer feedback when deciding to recommend a brand or product. Give that one a thought. It means that having fewer complaints on Reddit boosts the chances of free lead gen through ChatGPT. The platforms themselves keep changing their algorithms so one month the recommendations may be heavily influenced by Reddit while the next month they are not. It’s variable.

Reddit is a good source of raw, unfiltered feedback from users who took the initiative to blast you anonymously in public but didn’t send a support ticket. It’s a good place to monitor for disgruntlement with your product and reach out to users directly to resolve their problems. It’s not a great place to base your market research for new products.

Takeaway: Reddit is a good place to pro-actively connect with disgruntled users. It’s not a great place to perform product research.

CorZen agents are available to work for you inside of project plans or as stand alone workers. We are in beta for our first ever ‘Stands On Its Own’ agent. The Monitor Buying Signals agent (beta) is accessed through the Agent directory but not through a project plan. Why would we do this?

We have been working on this agent for over 5 weeks and it’s rather special compared to the other agents. This one goes out on a scheduled weekly basis and identifies customers that match your Ideal Customer Profile to deliver a weekly report to your email. It is now available in beta and I use it for CorZen leads. It’s different than the other agents because you control the frequency at which you receive leads. You can schedule it to run once, run weekly for 4 weeks, or run weekly indefinitely until you turn it off. If it was triggered inside of a project plan, it would turn off when the plan was completed. By remaining a stand-alone agent, you control how long it persists.

The beta status means that we find value in using it but aren’t 100% satisfied that it can’t be improved. Results are vastly superior when you authorize your optional Apollo API key to enrich the data. Our goal is to create an agent that does not require external API charges to produce high quality leads. I find this agent valuable in beta because it identifies potential customers but also suggests an opening for your cold email or DM. It may suggest that you lead with a recent funding announcement, a new hire, a new role posted, or some other trigger that makes this now a good time to evaluate your product or service.

We will share updates on this lead gen agent in the coming weeks, and invite you to give it a try. The agent learns over time, so the first report may offer 5-6 leads while the third report may offer 40 or more.

Takeaway: The Monitor Buying Intent agent (beta) sends a weekly lead gen report based on market news for your ideal customer.

“Just vibe code it” advice is building pockets of weakness in large enterprise companies…this is a great time to pay attention and build your tool on a solid foundation.