About us
About Needle
Needle is a buyer-intent search platform. We help founders and GTM teams find customers in the conversations they are already having - across Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, GitHub and 10+ public communities, ranked by buying intent and fit instead of keyword noise.
Who we are
Needle is founder-led and intentionally small - no enterprise bloat, no bloated roadmap. It is built by people who have felt the problem firsthand: the customers you want are already talking in public, and they are hard to find before someone else does.
We are remote, we ship fast, and we work in the open - learning from the same communities we help you search. Every release is judged by one question: does this help you find a real buyer conversation today?
We build for founders and GTM teams who want signal over noise - people who would rather join the right conversation than blast a bigger list.
Our story
Needle was built to solve a critical problem every entrepreneur faces: finding their first customers. In today's digital world, people actively looking for solutions are scattered across Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, YouTube, GitHub, Product Hunt, and other public communities your tools may not cover in one pass, making it hard to manually find and connect with potential early users.
Our product centers on Search: Manual search is a custom query you run on demand across the communities your plan includes, with sentiment and buying intent on each result. Brands power Auto Search - Needle runs scheduled passes using the phrases, sites, and cadence you save in Settings, with optional digest alerts to connected channels, so you do not live in tabs (every paid plan includes one brand profile). Trending Problems highlights rising pain in startup communities. See Pricing for limits and platform access.
We help professionals cut through the digital noise to discover genuine, high-intent users who could become their first customers. Like finding a needle in a haystack, we make the impossible feel effortless.
What we believe
- The best customer conversations are already happening in public - your job is to find them, not interrupt them.
- Keyword alerts create noise. Ranking by buying intent and fit creates signal.
- Honest comparisons earn more trust than hype - so we publish them, even when a rival wins a row.
- Privacy is a feature: we only read public content, and your searches stay yours.
- Ship fast, learn faster - the product should be better than it was last week.
What makes Needle different
Community intent search
We rank public threads by buying intent and fit across up to 10+ communities - so you open conversations where people already compare tools and describe pain.
Ongoing intelligence
Every feature supports long-term value - Search across public platforms, Auto Search and digests for your brand, Trending Problems, and snapshots of activity so you find buyer conversations where they already happen.
Privacy-first
Your searches and results remain private. We only analyze publicly available content and never store personal data from the platforms we search.
Real-time insights
Get instant access to trending problems, ranked search results, and brand-ready signals - updated in real time to help you find customers faster.
Meet the founder
I built Needle to solve a problem I faced as an entrepreneur: how do you find your first customers? The platform searches across Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, YouTube, Product Hunt, and 5 other platforms to help professionals connect with people actively looking for solutions like theirs.
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