Shawn Tenam is co-founder of Clearbox, a Reddit opportunity inbox that surfaces the threads where buyers are already asking for what a company sells. He spent roughly a decade as a plumber before breaking into tech as an SDR and founding BDR, went deep on Clay, spent time at RevPartners, and then went all-in as a go-to-market engineer building GTM systems with Claude Code — including the Reddit engine that became Clearbox.
“And the more we do that, the less trust I see we build, not just on Reddit, but just on everything.”
“On Reddit, they can downvote it, they can comment, hey, this is AI slop, or they can complain to a moderator and get you banned for it.”
“If you're blindly using AI, whether for Reddit, LinkedIn, Substack, or any of your content, you're doing yourself so much of a disservice.”
“I'm going to really just go into the channels and just scroll and speak is how I called it. I was like, if I don't have nothing to say, I won't say it.”
“It's not just one person because he's asking in the subreddit. He's validating that there's a need to the 10 or 50 or 100 other lurkers that might be just viewing that.”
“Everybody thinks, oh, you have to backlink on Reddit in order for people to cite you. You actually don't even have to backlink.”
“If I was a business development manager, why wouldn't I want to have my rep dedicate an hour a day to being useful in a community like Reddit?”
“We would run Clay agents to research every domain or a Firecrawl to grab it. And that gives you something, but it doesn't tell you anything about the person buying.”