I got banned from 3 subreddits trying to find my first customers. Here's what I learned

Yeah, so this was me three months ago. I'd spent a lot of money on marketing and paid advertising, and I really didn't get enough ROI from it. So then one night I just randomly participated in the thread and in fact got two new customers or users. That might not sound significant but for me at that time it was something that just flicked my mind. I just realized I think this is a better way than just spending cash on ads.

So, then I manually tried to find conversations where my ICP was talking so I posted in wrong threads, got flagged as spam, and eventually got banned. It fucking felt impossible. Every founder knows this pain: the product is ready, but no one knows that it exists, and you don't know where to find them. That's a problem that everyone faces.

Most founders think distribution equals ads or cold outreach but most of buying decisions in SaaS start with someone asking questions in a community like Reddit, HN, Indiehackers, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. The problem isn't that customers aren't talking about your problem. It's that you have no system to find those conversations at the right moment. By the time you find them manually, someone else already replied and boom, he's one step ahead of you trying to get the same customer.

Here's my question for everyone: how are you currently finding conversations where your future customers are talking exactly about what you built and is it working? I built AXL to solve this exact problem after failing at it manually for like three months. I would love to hear how others are approaching it