---
title: "Why You Can't Automate Reddit"
episode: 110
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Shawn Tenam"
guest_title: "Co-Founder"
date_published: 2026-09-03
date_modified: 2026-09-14
duration: 01:03:44
word_count: 11490
topics: ["demand-generation", "ai-in-gtm", "gtm-strategy", "brand-positioning", "outbound-sales"]
canonical_url: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/shawn-tenam-lila-rest-clearbox-why-you-cant-automate-reddit/
source: "LeanScale Knowledge Hub — https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Why You Can't Automate Reddit

_Clearbox co-founders Shawn Tenam and Lila Rest on why Reddit rewards the human effort automation can't fake, how to earn your way past the karma gate, and the cost engineering behind a $75-a-month product_

**Episode 110 · The LeanScale Podcast**  
Shawn Tenam, Co-Founder (Clearbox) · Hosted by Anthony Enrico  
Published September 3, 2026 · Updated September 14, 2026 · 01:03:44  
Canonical: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/shawn-tenam-lila-rest-clearbox-why-you-cant-automate-reddit/

**Topics:** Demand Generation · AI in GTM · GTM Strategy · Brand & Positioning · Outbound & Sales Development


## Executive summary

Shawn Tenam spent about a decade as a plumber before moving into go-to-market as an SDR, then a founding BDR, then what he calls a Claude Code-pilled go-to-market engineer. Reddit became his channel at the same moment the terminal did: he was building things in public, needed people to know about them, and found that on Reddit, unlike LinkedIn, the community tells you straight away whether your content is relevant. Lila Rest, the product and engineering co-founder, initially said no. After three or four weeks of conversations he cut Shawn's feature-heavy prototype down to one idea — an inbox where the Reddit threads worth your time land — and built it in about a month and a half. That product is Clearbox.

Their central argument is that what makes Reddit valuable is exactly what makes it impossible to automate. Shawn's biggest misconception about any channel is the reflex to automate it, and the more teams do, the less trust they build. On LinkedIn an AI-written comment gets scrolled past; on Reddit it gets downvoted, called AI slop, or reported to a moderator. Lila adds the structural reason. LinkedIn earns from ads and subscriptions, while Reddit makes most of its money from data contracts, so it is highly incentivised to keep content human — and that pressure runs down through moderators, who lose their subreddits if quality slips, to members, who leave. The cold email subreddit being banned entirely is his evidence.

The operating model is to do less, in the right place. Lila recommends five to ten genuine comments a day, prioritised toward fast-moving threads on large subreddits that will be referenced on Google and surface in Claude and ChatGPT. Clearbox's first week of using its own product found 70 people openly asking for help with distribution and Reddit marketing. Shawn's tactics are about earning the right to be there: a scroll-and-speak weekend to clear the karma gate most subreddits set at 50 to 100, no bought or warmed accounts, participation well beyond your own product so nobody calls you an astroturfer, and no link until someone asks — a useful mention still gets cited without one. Lila's rule for posts is to write about the problem, not the product, then DM the people who engage.

The second half turns to what happens to SaaS when, in Shawn's words, anybody can build something cool in a weekend Claude Code session. Anthony argues SaaS has lost its technical moat and is becoming a service business — expertise packaged into something repeatable and marketed authentically — with more sober valuations to follow. Lila's version is distribution, cost and speed: a do-it-yourself Reddit scraper analysing every comment would cost at least $5,000 a month, while Clearbox charges $75 after discarding keyword and semantic search as too noisy. The cost moat is literal. Lila quantized Google's Gemma 4 31B to fit a single consumer GPU, about ten times cheaper than an API for their use case, and argues small task-specific models can be a thousand times cheaper while keeping 95% of the intelligence.

For revenue leaders the practical lesson is less about Reddit tooling than about where buyer understanding comes from. Shawn's case is that an SDR spending an hour a day being useful in a community learns what a VP of Sales actually worries about in Q3, which domain research never reveals. Anthony closes on his own distinction — efficiency has a limit, effectiveness is almost unlimited — and on Reddit as perhaps the last bit of humanity left in social networks.


## Key takeaways

1. **The biggest Reddit misconception is that you have to automate it** — Shawn sees the same reflex in every channel: content packs, cold email personalised to every single person, AI-written comments. The more teams do it, the less trust they build — the cold email that references a company you left six months ago is the familiar version.
   _Why it matters:_ His rule is to let AI get you to roughly 80% — a template, an idea, the research behind a thesis — but make sure it is your own voice pressing send.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Sales Leaders

2. **Reddit is structurally incentivised to stay human — LinkedIn isn't** — Lila's point is about business models. LinkedIn makes its money from ads and subscriptions; Reddit makes most of its money from data contracts, so the quality of human content is what it sells. That incentive runs down through moderators, who get banned if their subreddit slips, and members, who stop coming when they are not satisfied.
   _Why it matters:_ The cold email subreddit was recently banned entirely for not being properly moderated. A strategy that depends on low-quality volume is betting against the platform's own revenue model.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, Revenue Executives

3. **On Reddit, AI slop gets punished, not ignored** — On LinkedIn an AI-written comment gets scrolled past. On Reddit people can downvote it, reply that it is AI slop, or complain to a moderator and get the account banned. Shawn also finds AI comment patterns recognisable enough that he knows a repeat commenter's phrasing before he reads it.
   _Why it matters:_ Imperfect but genuine wins. Anthony's version is the trusted second reader: he and his COO screenshot messages for each other before sending, and they took em dashes out because people assume they signal AI-written copy.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Sales Leaders, Founders

4. **Do less, in the right place** — Out of a hundred opportunities, Lila would pick the handful on very big subreddits that are already taking off — his example is a thread at 5,000 impressions after 15 minutes — because more people will keep reading it and it will be referenced on Google and visible in Claude and ChatGPT. Five to ten good comments a day compound; hundreds of automated ones get you banned.
   _Why it matters:_ Clearbox's export to Claude, ChatGPT or other agents includes a prompt that discourages the agent from writing the user's messages and instead educates the user on prioritising their time.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, Sales Leaders

5. **Reddit threads are pipeline, not just awareness** — In the first week of using Clearbox for Clearbox, it surfaced 70 people clearly saying on Reddit that they needed help with distribution and Reddit marketing — before counting competitor or engagement opportunities. Shawn adds that one person asking for a tool in a subreddit is also validating the need to the 10, 50 or 100 lurkers reading.
   _Why it matters:_ For an early business trying to validate its market and find first customers, these are people openly complaining about the problem you solve.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Marketing Leaders

6. **Earn your way past the karma gate by scrolling and speaking** — Most subreddits will not let you post until you have roughly 50 to 100 karma. Shawn's first attempt to grow on Reddit was to automate it through the Reddit API; what worked was a weekend of going into the channels and commenting only when he had value, a take or advice to share. It took about three or four days.
   _Why it matters:_ The ramp is short when the participation is real. Shawn frames Clearbox partly as a list of the places you can scroll and speak without having to hunt for them.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders

7. **Don't buy warmed accounts — diversify what you talk about** — Users ask Shawn whether to buy warmed or multiple Reddit accounts, and he says no: Reddit is actively looking for exactly that. His alternative is to use Reddit for your own interests as well, and to share value about every tool that genuinely helps you, not only your own.
   _Why it matters:_ Because his activity spans far more than Clearbox, nobody can credibly call him an astroturfer. One strong, genuine account is the asset.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, Revenue Executives

8. **You don't need a backlink to get cited** — Shawn says a useful mention of your product in a thread gets cited without a URL, and people often ask for the link themselves. His Fujifilm story shows the mechanism: asking Google which lens to buy returned four citations, all Reddit threads with real user advice, and he bought the lens on that recommendation.
   _Why it matters:_ Genuine Reddit participation feeds AI answers directly. The value is in being helpful in threads that buyers and models both read, not in dropping links.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Revenue Executives

9. **Post the problem, not the product — and never lead with a link** — Lila calls it the biggest rule on Reddit: don't share links or products before people beg for them. Someone who asks a question and gets five replies linking products that don't quite fit will not engage and may report them as advertising. For posts, write about the problem you solve with real insight — for Clearbox, how hard distribution is when anyone can create SaaS — and let commenters ask.
   _Why it matters:_ Anyone who engages with that post is probably in the same boat, which makes a follow-up DM a natural introduction rather than a cold pitch.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, Sales Leaders

10. **Reddit may let a company build a voice that outlasts one employee** — Anthony notes that company pages underperform on most platforms and that personal brands leave when people change jobs. Lila agrees people want to talk to people — organisation accounts on X do worse than the CEO or engineers talking — and on Reddit, where most people stay anonymous, the way an account writes is what tells you whether it is a company.
   _Why it matters:_ Anthony's conclusion: keep a brand voice within a small group who genuinely enjoy responding and prioritise threads where they add value, and Reddit could be one of the few platforms where a company-dedicated account grows without leaving with the person behind it.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Revenue Executives

11. **An hour a day in a community teaches reps what copy and enrichment can't** — Shawn contrasts SDRs splitting their day between cold calling and automated emails that no longer work with an hour a day spent being useful on Reddit. Having run seven or eight Clay workspaces at an agency, his view is that researching every domain gives you something but tells you nothing about the person buying.
   _Why it matters:_ A rep calling a VP of Sales may know the product but not what that buyer feels in Q3, over the holidays, worrying about reps hitting quota. Community time builds that understanding and exposes seasonal buyer sentiment.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, Revenue Executives

12. **SaaS has lost its technical moat** — Anthony's argument is that SaaS once scaled on technology that was hard to replicate plus advertising that was cheap at the time, and that people can now build their own products with Claude. Shawn's version: anybody can take a weekend with a Claude Code session and build something cool, but can you distribute it, secure it and sell it?
   _Why it matters:_ Differentiation shifts to domain expertise, service and marketing that is authentic and connected to customers — effort Anthony says many SaaS companies are not used to making.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, Marketing Leaders

13. **The new SaaS model is distribution, cost and speed** — Lila spent a month asking whether SaaS is dead and concluded that distribution is more important than ever, alongside cost and speed — nobody wants a product that takes a month to learn before it delivers value. Asking Claude Code to build a Reddit scraper that analyses every comment would cost at least $5,000 a month; Clearbox costs $75.
   _Why it matters:_ Cheaper shortcuts such as keyword matching and semantic search were discarded as too noisy. The claim is that about 90% of what surfaces is signal, reviewed in ten minutes a day instead of hours of scrolling.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives

14. **Cost engineering is a moat: small models keep most of the intelligence** — Lila quantized Google's Gemma 4 31B to fit a single consumer GPU and optimised it for Clearbox's use case, running about ten times cheaper than via API. His broader claim is that small models built for a specific task can be around a thousand times cheaper than big-lab models while retaining 95% of the intelligence on that task.
   _Why it matters:_ Shawn credits this with why Clearbox is still running: on a ChatGPT-wrapper cost structure, a thousand users with many on trials can burn through a startup's runway. A $20K-a-month model bill an enterprise accepts is prohibitive for anyone smaller.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives

15. **Efficiency has a limit; effectiveness doesn't** — Anthony is fine with AI providing efficiency, but what excites him is doing things better, because there is a limit to how efficient you can be and almost none to how effective you can be. He sees SaaS companies, service companies and anyone else building local models to do the job better as the opportunity.
   _Why it matters:_ He does not count himself among the doomers: there will be pain in a major transition, but the case for AI rests on effectiveness, not only on cost-cutting.
   _For:_ Revenue Executives, Founders


## Frameworks

### The Automation Trap (08:57)

**Definition:** The more a team automates a channel — content packs, personalised cold email at scale, AI-written comments — the less trust it builds, because the patterns become recognisable and the audience discounts them.

Shawn applies it to every growth channel but most strongly to Reddit, where users can downvote, call out AI slop and get accounts banned. AI should get you to about 80%; the human presses send.

### Reddit's Layered Incentive to Stay Human (14:42)

**Definition:** Because Reddit's revenue depends on the quality of human content rather than on ads, pressure to keep content human runs through three layers: the company, the moderators who can lose their subreddits, and the members who leave when quality drops.

Lila contrasts it with LinkedIn's ads-and-subscriptions model and cites the cold email subreddit being banned entirely for poor moderation.

### Do Less, in the Right Place (16:53)

**Definition:** Prioritise a small number of high-value threads — large subreddits, fast-moving discussions likely to be referenced by search and AI assistants — and write genuinely human content, instead of commenting at volume.

Five to ten comments a day compound into visibility, AI citations and direct leads, while a banned account means rebuilding reputation and karma from scratch.

### Scroll and Speak (22:16)

**Definition:** Building karma and credibility by browsing relevant subreddits and commenting only when you have genuine value, a take or advice to share — and saying nothing otherwise.

Shawn's name for the weekend that replaced his attempt to automate Reddit through the API. It got him past the karma gate in about three or four days.

### The Karma Gate (22:33)

**Definition:** The karma threshold — typically around 50 to 100 — that most subreddits require before an account can post, earned when people upvote its comments and posts.

Shawn treats it as the first thing a new account has to earn honestly. He also uses karma and vote ratios as a quality filter when mining threads for insight: a downvoted thread, or one full of 'this is AI slop' replies, is not worth extracting from.

### Post the Problem, Not the Product (34:37)

**Definition:** Never share links or products until people ask; when you post, write about the problem you solve with real insight, then follow up by direct message with the people who engage.

Lila's example is a post in the SaaS subreddit about how hard distribution is when anyone can build software, rather than a pitch for Clearbox. Commenters ask about it on their own, and anyone engaging is probably in the same boat.

### Distribution, Cost and Speed (47:03)

**Definition:** Lila's model for where SaaS goes when anyone can build a product: win on distribution, deliver at a fraction of what it would cost the buyer to build, and produce value quickly without a steep learning curve.

Clearbox's version is $75 a month against a $5,000-a-month do-it-yourself build, and ten minutes a day instead of hours of scrolling. He points to a product that hands you the ten highest-intent people in your market each day as the same minimalist pattern.

### SaaS Is Becoming a Service (50:25)

**Definition:** SaaS companies are increasingly service companies: they turn hard-won domain expertise into something repeatable, much as a consultancy builds frameworks, because the software itself is no longer hard to build.

Anthony does not think SaaS is dead, but expects more sober valuations. Everyone has access to the equivalent of Excel or PowerPoint; the secret sauce is what you put on the canvas and which customer problem you aim it at.

### Small Models, 95% of the Intelligence (57:03)

**Definition:** Replacing expensive frontier-model calls with small, task-specific models — such as quantized open models — that cost a fraction as much while retaining most of the intelligence for that task.

Lila quantized Gemma 4 31B to run on a single consumer GPU for Clearbox, roughly ten times cheaper than an API, and argues specialised small models can be about a thousand times cheaper than big-lab models while keeping 95% of task intelligence.

### Efficiency Has a Limit, Effectiveness Doesn't (01:00:21)

**Definition:** There is a ceiling on how much more efficient a process can become, but almost no ceiling on how much more effective it can be — so the bigger prize from AI is doing the work better, not just cheaper.

Anthony's closing frame for the SaaS and local-model discussion, and the reason he says he is not one of the doomers.


## Quotes

_Speakers inferred from an undiarized transcript — verify before attributing._

> "And the more we do that, the less trust I see we build, not just on Reddit, but just on everything."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (09:16)

> "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."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (10:24)

> "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."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (13:19)

> "It's important to see that Reddit is a player highly incentivized to keep its content as human as possible."
>
> — Lila Rest, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (14:42)

> "That's a matter of doing less, but at the right place, and writing human content."
>
> — Lila Rest, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (16:53)

> "It's just people openly complaining about the problem you solve."
>
> — Lila Rest, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (18:26)

> "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."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (22:16)

> "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."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (24:10)

> "Everybody thinks, oh, you have to backlink on Reddit in order for people to cite you. You actually don't even have to backlink."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (30:22)

> "Don't share your links, don't share your products before people beg you about it. That's like the biggest rule on Reddit."
>
> — Lila Rest, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (34:37)

> "Just don't be excited by the volume. There's so many opportunities, but start small, start with like five to 10 comments a day."
>
> — Lila Rest, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (35:43)

> "This might be one of the few platforms you could build a company dedicated user that can grow over time and doesn't leave with the person behind it."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (38:16)

> "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?"
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (38:44)

> "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."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (41:32)

> "We're in an era where anybody can take a weekend with a Claude Code session and really build something cool, but can you distribute that? Can you make it secure? Can you sell it to other people?"
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (45:28)

> "It's going to cost you like $5,000 a month minimum. And on Clearbox, it costs you $75 a month."
>
> — Lila Rest, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (48:04)

> "I think SaaS is really going to move more to a service industry."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (51:12)

> "If you're running on a ChatGPT wrapper, you can lose your runway and go out really quick."
>
> — Shawn Tenam, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (55:15)

> "There is a huge potential at creating small models that are very good at something like a thousand times cheaper than the models from the big labs and like retain 95% of the intelligence on that specific task."
>
> — Lila Rest, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (57:03)

> "There's a limiting rate to how efficient you can be, but how effective you can be is almost unlimited."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 110 (01:00:32)


## Practical advice by role

### Founders

- Treat Reddit as a place to find first users by being useful rather than by automating — start with one genuine account and five to ten comments a day.
- Use your own growth channel visibly; Shawn's test is that nobody should buy a growth tool from someone who can't show they use it to grow.
- Model per-user inference cost before building on frontier-model APIs, and consider a quantized open model for high-volume, narrow tasks.
- Choose a co-founder who will disagree with you — if they agree with everything, their approval tells you nothing.
- Differentiate on domain expertise, distribution, cost and speed rather than on software anyone can now build in a weekend.

### Marketing Leaders

- Research which subreddits your buyers actually use and read each community's norms on promotion before posting.
- Post about the problem you solve with real insight; share links only when asked, and DM the people who engage.
- Prioritise fast-moving threads on large subreddits that are likely to be referenced by Google and AI assistants.
- Reverse-engineer recurring Reddit questions into SEO and GEO content.
- Keep your brand voice within a small group of people who genuinely enjoy responding, and use AI for research and drafts, not for the final words.

### Sales Leaders

- Give reps an hour a day to be useful in communities where buyers talk, instead of adding more automated email.
- Use community threads to learn seasonal buyer pressure — quarter-end, holidays, the run-up to President's Club — before you call.
- Treat a buyer publicly asking for a tool as a signal to many silent lurkers, not just a single lead.

### Revenue Executives

- Don't buy or farm warmed accounts; one strong, genuine presence is the durable asset and the lower platform risk.
- Scale paid spend only behind messaging that has already proven itself organically.
- Expect SaaS moats to move toward expertise and service, and budget for authentic marketing rather than advertising alone.
- Judge AI investments on effectiveness gains, not only on efficiency.


## AI takeaways

**Thesis:** Two claims run through the episode. The first is that AI makes authenticity scarcer and therefore more valuable: automated participation is recognisable, Reddit has economic reasons to punish it, and the winning move is fewer, genuinely human contributions in the right threads — with AI helping decide where to spend time, not what to say. The second is that once anyone can build software in a weekend, SaaS competes on distribution, expertise and the cost of intelligence, and cost engineering with small, quantized open models is what makes a $75-a-month product viable.

- **** — 
- **** — 
- **** — 
- **** — 
- **** — 
- **** — 
- **** — 

**Agent & automation ideas**

- An opportunity export to Claude or ChatGPT that ranks threads and coaches the user on where to spend time, rather than writing replies.
- Thread prioritisation by velocity — flag threads on large subreddits gaining impressions and votes fast, while commenting still matters.
- A workflow that turns recurring Reddit questions from your buyers into SEO and GEO blog content.
- A seasonal buyer-sentiment feed tracking what ICP subreddits discuss around quarter-end, holidays and slow periods.
- A small, quantized open model for high-volume classification in place of per-call frontier-model APIs.


## Operations takeaways

### Pipeline & marketing ops

- **.** 
- **.** 
- **.** 
- **.** 
- **.** 


## Metrics mentioned

| Value | Metric | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 70 | First-week dogfooding leads | People on Reddit clearly asking for help with distribution and Reddit marketing, surfaced in Clearbox's first week of using its own product. |
| 5–10 comments a day | Recommended daily volume | Lila's starting point instead of hundreds of automated comments; Shawn personally aims for at least five natural comments a day. |
| ~50–100 karma | Karma gate | The typical minimum most subreddits require before an account can post. |
| 3–4 days | Scroll-and-speak ramp | How long Shawn's weekend of genuine commenting took to get him past the karma gate. |
| $5,000+/month vs $75/month | Do-it-yourself versus Clearbox cost | Lila's estimate for a Claude Code-built Reddit scraper analysing every comment with a model, against Clearbox's price. |
| ~90% | Signal ratio | Share of what Clearbox surfaces that Lila describes as signal, after keyword and semantic search were discarded as noisy. |
| 10 minutes a day | Time spent on the channel | Lila's description of working Reddit through the inbox instead of hours of scrolling. |
| ~10x cheaper than API | Quantized Gemma cost | Gemma 4 31B quantized to a single consumer GPU and optimised for Clearbox's use case. |
| ~1,000x cheaper, 95% of task intelligence | Small-model potential | Lila's claim for small, task-specific models compared with big-lab models. |
| ~600K downloads last month; ~1M views on Twitter | Gemma model reach | Traction for the quantized build on Hugging Face; Shawn puts total downloads at almost a million. |
| $20K/month | Enterprise versus startup tolerance | A model bill Lila says an enterprise might accept if it brings $200K-a-year contracts, but a startup would not spend on something unproven. |
| ~1.5 months | Time to build the product | How long Lila took to build what Clearbox is today after the co-founders simplified the prototype. |


## Entities mentioned

- **Clearbox** (company) — The guests' company: a Reddit opportunity inbox that surfaces threads where someone mentions the problem you solve, where competitors are engaging, or where you can add value without pitching. Priced at $75 a month, it offers an API and an export to Claude, ChatGPT or other agents with a prompt that coaches prioritisation rather than drafting replies. Its first week of use on itself surfaced 70 leads. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/company/clearbox/
- **Google** (company) — Named as a counterparty to Reddit's data contracts, as the search engine whose AI answer cited four Reddit threads when Shawn researched a camera lens, and as the maker of Gemma, the open model Lila quantized; a Google researcher reposted the result. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/company/google/
- **OpenAI** (company) — Its models, alongside Anthropic's, are cited by Lila as the state of the art that is so expensive it discourages companies from optimising many processes; ChatGPT is named as one place fast-moving Reddit threads become visible. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/company/openai/
- **Anthropic** (company) — Named alongside OpenAI as a big lab whose state-of-the-art models are too expensive for many automation tasks, which is the gap Lila's small-model approach targets. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/company/anthropic/
- **Hugging Face** (company) — Where Lila published his quantized Gemma 4 31B build, which Hugging Face reposted. It reached about 600,000 downloads in the previous month. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/company/hugging-face/
- **LeanScale** (company) — Anthony's firm. He describes screenshotting messages with LeanScale's COO for a second opinion before sending, calls Reddit hyper-relevant to LeanScale's own growth. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/company/leanscale/
- **Shawn Tenam** (person, guest) —  · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/guest/shawn-tenam/
- **Lila Rest** (person, guest) —  · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/guest/lila-rest/
- **Anthony Enrico** (person, host) — Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/guest/anthony-enrico/
- **Reddit** (tool, Community / Social) — The channel the episode is about: a B2B growth channel where communities hold each other accountable, users can downvote or report AI slop, most subreddits gate posting behind roughly 50–100 karma, and threads get cited in AI answers.
- **LinkedIn** (tool, Social Platform) — The contrast case. Shawn grew his brand there but describes it as shouting into the void and more tolerant of AI-written content; Anthony would like it to add a dislike button and notes company pages underperform.
- **Claude Code** (tool, AI Dev Tool) — What Shawn means by getting 'Claude Code-pilled'. He builds websites and his Reddit playbook in plan mode through phased tests before production; Lila estimates a do-it-yourself Reddit opportunity scraper built with it would cost $5,000 a month or more to run.
- **Claude** (tool, AI Assistant) — A destination for Clearbox's opportunity export; the assistant that told Shawn he could simply get Reddit API access; the model the co-founders built skills for to generate human-sounding copy, which Lila does not recommend for most teams; and, for Anthony, evidence that people can now build their own products.
- **ChatGPT** (tool, AI Assistant) — An export destination for Clearbox opportunities and a place Reddit threads surface. Shawn warns that a startup running on a ChatGPT wrapper can burn through its runway quickly.
- **Clay** (tool, GTM Data / Enrichment) — Shawn's long-time tool. He ran seven or eight Clay workspaces at an agency and used Clay agents to research every domain, which he says gives you something but tells you nothing about the person buying.
- **Cursor** (tool, AI Dev Tool) — Shawn's on-ramp to building: a YouTube video about building with Cursor led to a weekend meme generator, and later Cursor with MCPs until he hit limits and cost.
- **Gemma** (tool, Open-Weight AI Model) — Google's open model. Lila quantized Gemma 4 31B to run on a single consumer GPU and optimised it for Clearbox's use case at about ten times cheaper than via API; the build went viral after he published it on Hugging Face.
- **PostHog** (tool, Product Analytics) — Cited as an example of a large company pivoting from analytics, feature flags and A/B testing toward a hub for automating a business and keeping track of its agents.
- **X (Twitter)** (tool, Social Platform) — Lila notes organisation-level accounts there perform worse than the CEO, CPO or engineers posting personally. The quantized Gemma model drew about a million views on Twitter.
- **TikTok** (tool, Social Platform) — Shawn's model for when to run ads: post many pieces organically and put paid spend only behind the ones that clear a views threshold.


## FAQ

**Q: Why can't you automate marketing on Reddit?**

A: According to Clearbox co-founders Shawn Tenam and Lila Rest, the reason Reddit works as a B2B channel is the same reason it resists automation. Unlike LinkedIn, which earns from ads and subscriptions, Reddit makes most of its money from data contracts, so it is highly incentivised to keep content human. That pressure runs through moderators, who can lose their subreddits, and through members, who can downvote a post, reply that it is AI slop, or report the account to get it banned. The cold email subreddit was banned entirely for poor moderation. Shawn's rule is to let AI get you about 80% of the way, through research or a draft idea, but to make sure your own voice presses send.

**Q: How do you build karma on a new Reddit account?**

A: Most subreddits will not let an account post until it has roughly 50 to 100 karma, which you earn when people upvote your comments and posts. Shawn Tenam's method is what he calls scroll and speak: go into relevant subreddits, comment only when you have genuine value, a take or advice to share, and say nothing otherwise. After an attempt to automate Reddit through its API, a weekend of doing this got him past the karma gate in about three or four days. He also recommends using Reddit for your own interests, not only your product, so your history reads as a real participant rather than an astroturfer.

**Q: Should you share links to your product on Reddit?**

A: Not until someone asks. Lila Rest of Clearbox calls it the biggest rule on Reddit: a person asking for help who gets five replies linking products that are not quite what they need will not engage, and may report them as advertising. Instead, post about the problem you solve with real insight and let commenters ask what you use. People often request the link on their own, and anyone who engages with a problem-focused post is likely in the same situation, so a follow-up direct message is a natural introduction. Some subreddits do accept posts about what you are building, so read each community's norms first.

**Q: Do you need a backlink on Reddit to get cited by ChatGPT, Claude or Google?**

A: No. Shawn Tenam, co-founder of Clearbox, says a useful mention of a product in a Reddit thread gets cited without a link, and people frequently ask for the link themselves. Reddit threads show up directly in AI answers: when Shawn asked Google which lens to buy for a new Fujifilm camera, the answer cited four Reddit threads with real user advice, and he bought the lens it recommended. His co-founder Lila Rest adds that fast-moving threads on large subreddits keep attracting readers and get referenced on Google and in Claude and ChatGPT, which is why they are worth prioritising.

**Q: How many Reddit comments should a B2B team post each day?**

A: Clearbox co-founder Lila Rest recommends starting with five to ten genuine comments a day rather than hundreds of automated ones. Trying to be everywhere at once forces you to rely on language models for copy, and a banned account means rebuilding reputation and karma from scratch. A few well-placed comments compound: more people see them, they become visible to AI agents, and some turn into direct leads. His co-founder Shawn Tenam personally aims for at least five natural comments a day, focused on the opportunities most worth his time.

**Q: Should you buy warmed-up Reddit accounts?**

A: Shawn Tenam, co-founder of the Reddit opportunity inbox Clearbox, tells users no. Marketplaces for warmed or multiple Reddit accounts exist, but Reddit actively looks for exactly that behaviour. His advice is to build one strong, genuine account and diversify how you use it — follow your own interests and share value about every tool that helps you, not only your own product. Because his activity covers far more than Clearbox, nobody can credibly accuse him of astroturfing.

**Q: Who inside a company should engage on Reddit?**

A: Several roles can. Shawn Tenam of Clearbox argues that a sales development rep could spend an hour a day being useful in a community like Reddit instead of sending more automated email, and would learn what buyers actually worry about, such as a VP of Sales facing quota pressure over the holidays. Go-to-market engineers can pull opportunities through Clearbox's API into content and other workflows. LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico suggests keeping a consistent brand voice within a small group of people who genuinely enjoy responding, and notes that Reddit may be one of the few platforms where a company-dedicated account can grow over time without leaving when an employee does.

**Q: Is SaaS dead now that anyone can build software with AI?**

A: Anthony Enrico, co-founder of LeanScale, does not think so, but expects more sober valuations. SaaS once scaled on technology that was hard to replicate plus cheap advertising, and people can now build their own products with tools like Claude. He argues SaaS is moving toward a service industry: companies package years of domain expertise into something repeatable and win on how they serve customers and on authentic marketing. Lila Rest of Clearbox reaches a similar conclusion framed as distribution, cost and speed — distribution matters more than ever, and a product has to deliver value quickly, at a price far below what building it yourself would cost.

**Q: How can a startup afford to run AI across large volumes of data?**

A: Clearbox's answer is cost engineering. Co-founder Lila Rest estimates that having Claude Code build a Reddit scraper that analyses every comment with a model would cost at least $5,000 a month, while Clearbox charges $75. To make that work he quantized Google's open Gemma 4 31B model to fit on a single consumer GPU and optimised it for their use case, running about ten times cheaper than an API. He argues small task-specific models can be around a thousand times cheaper than big-lab models while retaining 95% of the intelligence on that task. His co-founder Shawn Tenam credits this with keeping Clearbox running, since a wrapper on a paid API can burn through a startup's runway quickly.


## Timeline

- **00:00** — Cold open + intro
- **01:44** — From plumbing to Claude Code: Shawn's origin story
- **04:20** — Why Reddit, when LinkedIn is shouting into the void
- **08:32** — The biggest misconceptions about Reddit
- **09:07** — The automation trap: why AI kills trust
- **14:47** — Why Reddit is structurally incentivized to stay human
- **17:12** — Do less, in the right place: 70 leads in week one
- **21:48** — The karma gate and the "scroll and speak" weekend
- **26:13** — How to fail at Reddit: warmed accounts and bad research
- **30:35** — You don't need a backlink to get cited
- **35:08** — Reddit etiquette: post the problem, not the product
- **42:00** — SaaS lost its moat — what replaces it?
- **46:28** — The new SaaS model: distribution, cost, and speed
- **50:25** — Anthony's take: SaaS isn't dead, it's becoming a service
- **54:29** — The Gemma quantization story
- **01:00:21** — Efficiency has a limit. Effectiveness doesn't.
- **01:02:00** — Where to find Clearbox


## Related episodes

- **Ep. 76: Your Marketing Playbook Is Dead** (Leysan Zigangirova (Async)) — The closest match in the archive: a Reddit playbook built on being genuine rather than pushy, from the marketing side of an AI product. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/leysan-zigangirova-marketing-playbook-dead/
- **Ep. 72: AI Search Is Changing Everything—Here’s the New Go-To-Market Playbook** (Mike Head (PartnerStack)) — Mike's point that most of what AI recommends comes from third-party content explains why a useful Reddit mention gets cited without a backlink. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/mike-head-ai-search-playbook/
- **Ep. 56: Your Website Isn't Built for AI** (Kevin White (Scrunch AI)) — Buyers researching through LLMs is the same shift that puts Reddit threads into the answers they read. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/kevin-white-website-built-for-ai/
- **Ep. 24: AI Is Breaking Sales — Here's How to Fix It** (Mustafa Saeed (Luella)) — Platforms fighting back against high-volume AI automation is the outbound version of Reddit banning automated and low-quality accounts. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/mustafa-saeed-ai-breaking-sales/
- **Ep. 42: Outbound Is Dying: How Spara's Multimodal AI Turns Inbound Into Pipeline (Live Demo)** (David Walker (Spara)) — The reverse network effect of AI outbound — the more people use it, the less any single email works — is the trust erosion Shawn describes across channels. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/david-walker-spara-multimodal-inbound/
- **Ep. 102: I Don't Want Your Product. I Want Your Expertise.** (Noah Marks (ECI Software Solutions)) — A buyer who wants expertise rather than product is the other side of Anthony's argument that SaaS is becoming a service business.
- **Ep. 62: This AI Tool Could Disrupt Sales Forever** (Christian Peverelli (Outbond)) — Distribution as the new bottleneck once AI makes building easy is the premise behind Lila's distribution, cost and speed model. · https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/christian-peverelli-ai-outbound/
- **Ep. 107: Why Circle's Co-Founder Ran 1,500 Sales Demos Before Hiring a Single Rep** (Andy Guttormsen (Circle)) — Andy's view that AI is diluting content and community is the durable alternative sits right beside the case for Reddit as the channel that stays human.


## Full transcript

_Machine-transcribed and not diarized; speaker attribution is inferred._  
_Transcript only, as a separate file: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/shawn-tenam-lila-rest-clearbox-why-you-cant-automate-reddit/transcript.md_

### 00:00 — Cold open + intro

**[0:00]** If you're blind being using AI, whether Reddit, LinkedIn, Substack, or any of your content,

**[0:05]** you're doing yourself so much of a disservice. I mean, maybe a year ago, it was okay because,

**[0:11]** you know, less people were doing it. So, like, you know, you can get away with it,

**[0:15]** but those patterns are starting to become much more and more clear.

**[0:18]** And the model's getting smaller. It isn't going to change that, in my opinion.

**[0:23]** My guests today are Sean Tenham and Lila Rest, the co-founders of Learbox,

**[0:28]** a tool that turns Reddit into a real go-to-market channel.

**[0:33]** Yeah, he's like, "By the way, I'm with my grandma. I didn't have much time to work,

**[0:36]** but I quantized Gemma for 31B and optimized it for our use case.

**[0:42]** I managed to have her running for 10X cheaper than via API."

**[0:46]** This is back in March.

**[0:47]** Super casual. Just a very average Sunday with my grandma.

**[0:51]** Yeah, I'm quantizing a Gemma model over the weekend.

**[0:54]** What do you think are some misconceptions, or how do you think people can take

**[0:59]** advantage of the channel, especially in a B2B SaaS and AI context?

**[1:04]** So, I would say one of the biggest misconceptions about Reddit, or, like, any channel right now

**[1:10]** that you want to grow in, is almost like the need or the feel that you have to automate that process.

**[1:16]** Like, distribution has always been a big thing, and you just said it, like,

**[1:21]** before Sean talks, like, more than ever, you have to be connected with the audience.

**[1:26]** You have to have empathy. You have to show, like,

**[1:30]** you're really understanding the problems, because there's just so much noise.

**[1:43]** Sean, you spent about 10 years as a plumber before any of this.

### 01:44 — From plumbing to Claude Code: Shawn's origin story

**[1:48]** Take me back to the moment you got, as you put it,

**[1:51]** cloud code-pilled, and how that turned into building Clearbox.

**[1:56]** Right, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, being a plumber, I was always a builder first, right?

**[2:02]** And part of, like, my whole persona or part of my branding while I was...

**[2:07]** So, I went from plumber to SDR to founding BDR to cloud code-pilled, go-to-market engineer.

**[2:13]** But I was always a builder at heart. I always wanted to, you know, take on this persona,

**[2:18]** somebody who builds in public, and, you know, just, I would say it was around that

**[2:23]** late December time where the models just got that much more intelligent.

**[2:27]** You know, you had 4.5, 4.6 was coming out, and I just said I was tired of just, you know,

**[2:34]** drag-and-dropping in tabs, and I wanted to actually start building stuff.

**[2:38]** So, it's kind of like a funny story where I just took a YouTube video where somebody

**[2:44]** was just telling you how to use cursor to build, and I wrote a post even on LinkedIn

**[2:49]** where I was like, I built a meme generator in a weekend just because I needed to break something.

**[2:55]** Because I was like, well, I'm not gonna, like, just upload or a CSV of all my client data or

**[3:01]** my partner data and start just messing around like that. I need to, like, figure this out, like,

**[3:05]** understand the UI, understand the differences between, you know, a coding agent and a coding

**[3:11]** editor. And, you know, it's like what I tell anybody else that's trying to learn, go to market,

**[3:15]** like, a code base, go to market engineering right now or programmable GTM, is you need the

**[3:21]** time and the terminal, you need the time to really spend working with the agents, breaking things,

**[3:26]** figuring it out, and then, like, okay, you get to that next phase and that next phase.

**[3:31]** So, for me, it was really just, you know, having a laptop with a clay table open, a Slack,

**[3:36]** a ClickUp, and five other, you know, Google Docs and just the computer moving at, like,

**[3:42]** turtle speed. And I'm just like, man, I know what I'm doing, I know how to get to where I need to go,

**[3:48]** but this isn't doing it. You start to hear about how you can use Cloud Code, not just to code for

**[3:53]** you, but to, like, organize files, ensure that your memory is being used efficiently. And that

**[4:00]** just kind of opened up that whole wormhole of, oh, what else can I do with this? Well, that next stage

**[4:05]** was actually building a website and then building a website was, well, how do I get people to know I

**[4:10]** even built one, right? So, Reddit kind of became that, like, initial channel where I was already

**[4:17]** growing my brand on LinkedIn, but, you know, we all know how LinkedIn is. It's like you're shouting

### 04:20 — Why Reddit, when LinkedIn is shouting into the void

**[4:22]** into the void sometimes where the beauty of Reddit and it's what kind of really got me immersed into

**[4:28]** it is that the communities or the cultures will tell you whether or not the content is relevant.

**[4:34]** No one's fake there, right? If you drop a, you know, a blog post about how you built a website

**[4:40]** using Next.js and Versal, people will read it and they'll give you their feedback. Some will be

**[4:45]** good. Some will be like, I mean, I used to joke when I, when I first dropped in Cloud Code, this

**[4:50]** website that I built and somebody wrote, like, yeah, he's got 40 features, but zero users.

**[4:56]** I thought it was funny because, like, a lot of people outvoted, but a lot of people were defending

**[5:00]** me at the same time and it just really gave you the idea of what, how Reddit works and how the

**[5:05]** threads work and how the sentiment can really help you, like, shape what you're doing, right? Like,

**[5:12]** you know, one of the biggest things I see in, like, the Reddit channels or specifically when it comes

**[5:17]** to builders or people who are, like, you know, trying to build their own tools in AI or whatnot

**[5:22]** is how do I get my first users? Where does that come from? And a lot of them will ask the question

**[5:28]** on Reddit and I'm like, you're, you're kind of on the channel where you can find those users.

**[5:34]** It's just about doing it the right way and being organic. It does take time. But in reality, the,

**[5:40]** you know, I started using Reddit at the same time I got Cloud Code build and both just became hand

**[5:47]** in hand. So, you know, you're six months later and yes, me and my co-founder who helped me build,

**[5:53]** helped build this brilliant, brilliant product. But it's the fact that I'm also doing the go to

**[5:58]** market engineering and sharing the workflows and the skills that, you know, just it makes it all

**[6:03]** work together, I would say. So, yeah, that's just my part of it. Like, you know, from that question.

**[6:10]** So, Lila, how did you end up getting involved? It sounded like you turned down the initial

**[6:15]** co-founder courtship, but what got you over the line and had you jump in?

**[6:22]** Yeah. So the previous startup I was working at, they're also good friends I've shown. And so we

**[6:28]** met like two years ago without ever really talking. I knew his name, he knew my name, but yeah,

**[6:35]** we never really had a talk. And when he started working on that, the same people, the same

**[6:40]** co-founders, they just suggested him that he reach out to me so we can have a talk.

**[6:46]** And we just started talking. Like I like, I like helping people. I'm just passionate

**[6:50]** about solving problems and startups in general. So I'm like always keen to a good conversation.

**[6:56]** And so at the beginning, yeah, it was very clear to me that I was not into jumping into a new

**[7:01]** startup. I was already working on some stuff. My schedule was packed, and there was no room for

**[7:09]** anything else. And then we have like this three, four weeks exchange time. And at the beginning,

**[7:15]** Sean comes with this idea is like, I see the value, but there's like features everywhere.

**[7:20]** And it's a bit overwhelming. And like we talked through it. And we come to that version that is

**[7:27]** like super minimal, doesn't try to do anything, but tries to just like, deliver the opportunity,

**[7:32]** the opportunity, like you have just an inbox. And the places you should spend your time on,

**[7:38]** on Reddit, they just land here. And it's, it's almost no learning curve, because everyone knows

**[7:44]** what a mailbox is. And I started getting excited. I remember I started getting excited about this

**[7:49]** idea. And I'm like, maybe it's a good time investment for me, maybe I should spend two,

**[7:54]** three weeks with Sean, I build that the guy looks solid on the GTM side and end up like starting

**[8:01]** building that that product, it takes of course, a little bit more time than expected took me like a

**[8:05]** month and a half to get to what third boxes today. But yeah, that's how we went. And since then the

**[8:12]** product is mainly the same now we are iterating on distribution and messaging and how to actually

**[8:18]** introduce you to the market. So I know Reddit is a very unique world. And I think some people

**[8:26]** just get it or some people haven't even stepped into it. But I think it's where the real operators

### 08:32 — The biggest misconceptions about Reddit

**[8:33]** and the real builders are living. I think there's a lot of LinkedIn famous people, I might be one of

**[8:39]** the people contributing to the noise that's out there in the void. But the people who are really

**[8:43]** building are on Reddit. What do you think are some misconceptions? Or how do you think people

**[8:50]** can take advantage of the channel, especially in a B2B sass and AI context? So I would say one of

**[8:57]** the biggest misconceptions misconceptions about Reddit, or like any channel right now that you

**[9:02]** want to growing is the almost like the need or the feel that you have to automate that process.

### 09:07 — The automation trap: why AI kills trust

**[9:08]** Right. Like, you know, especially you're in the go to market space, it's like we want to automate

**[9:11]** everything we want to automate LinkedIn's now we want to with AI, we can like create content packs,

**[9:16]** we can, you know, send cold email that's personalized to every single person. And the

**[9:22]** more we do that, the less trust I see we build, not just on Reddit, but just on everything like

**[9:27]** you can imagine, you get a cold email where somebody's mentioning, you know, the company

**[9:32]** that you left six months ago, and they're like, Hey, you know, what are you guys doing at x,

**[9:36]** and it happens all the time. And it's like, if you just like rather than focusing on that

**[9:41]** personal is a I know I'm going in a little more into the cold email side, but it applies even more

**[9:46]** on Reddit, because LinkedIn is, in my opinion, a lot less. What's the word? There are a lot chill

**[9:56]** more chill when it comes to people using AI, they're not going to call you out on it as much.

**[10:01]** Now, mind you, I believe that you should be as genuine as possible, you use AI to get you to that

**[10:06]** like 80% point where you have like a template, or you have an idea, or maybe you did the research

**[10:12]** to back up your thesis. But it should be you the human that's either posting or commenting. And

**[10:18]** with Reddit, it's even more important because, aside like LinkedIn, you know, somebody can like

**[10:24]** your vote, or they can just scroll past it. On Reddit, they can downvote it, they can comment,

**[10:29]** hey, this is AI slop, or they can complain to a moderator and get you banned for it. So it's like,

**[10:37]** you know, and I always say this to anybody that's like a user, I'm like, you know, I get it, the

**[10:41]** concept is you're online, and you want to talk and you want to be smart, and you don't want people to

**[10:46]** call you out for, you know, being incorrect. But specifically on Reddit, and I'm actually seeing

**[10:52]** this on LinkedIn, too, when I comment is being imperfect, but just being genuine and just showing

**[10:58]** that you're you showed up, and you gave your opinion will always just get a higher end reaction.

**[11:05]** You know, a lot of us we chase virality and hooks and, like, especially on LinkedIn with

**[11:10]** trying to pack as much into a comment as possible. I think I'd rather get a comment that has 50

**[11:16]** impressions to 100. But the three, four people that actually read it understood that this guy

**[11:23]** tried and he those guys might try and hire you. Like, you know, and it's the same vibe where

**[11:29]** LinkedIn and Reddit where you see the patterns, when people use AI to comment, where it's almost

**[11:35]** like contrived in a way where, like, if, like I have certain people like they'll comment on my

**[11:40]** post on LinkedIn and Reddit, and it's the same person, I don't even have to read the comment to

**[11:45]** know what the style or the phrasing is going to be. And it's just like, you know, I sometimes I'm

**[11:52]** like, I want to be like, yeah, hey, guys, maybe you want to figure a better way to do this. But,

**[11:57]** you know, that's the other issue. It's like, how do you, you know, educate people on that

**[12:01]** without offending them. So my best way to do that is just by leading by example, right? Like,

**[12:07]** I built a Reddit growth playbook that I share with a lot of our that I share with all our

**[12:12]** users. It's on my website. And the cool thing about that is because I'm not a go to market

**[12:16]** I'm gonna go to market engineer, he's the AI engineer, I can actually just give him that

**[12:20]** code, and he's able to actually input it into the landing page. And so that's the other beauty of

**[12:27]** the dynamic of how we work together. You know, I'm not just like, I mean, I'm a co founder,

**[12:32]** but I'm not just like a seller, I literally have been in the in the weeds the last two years

**[12:38]** working with API is working with data and like creating data relationships. So I think that was

**[12:43]** another appeal to Lila when working with me because, you know, like I said, he has his projects,

**[12:48]** he has his things and knowing that he has somebody on the team that can take in not I mean, look,

**[12:55]** I'm not trying to build features on a clear box. But being that ultimate, you know, hey, this is

**[13:01]** certain things we can phrase or say and give him real examples based on user input, I think is like

**[13:07]** another huge moat that we have together. But yeah, all this to say, like when it comes to

**[13:13]** how I view Reddit or really any growth channel right now is make sure at the end of the day,

**[13:19]** that it's your voice that is pressing send or, you know, you had that input. If you're blindly

**[13:25]** using AI, whether for Reddit, LinkedIn, sub stack, or any of your content, you're doing yourself so

**[13:31]** much of a disservice. I mean, maybe a year ago, it was it was okay, because, you know, less people

**[13:36]** were doing it. So like, you know, you can get away with it. But those patterns are starting to become

**[13:41]** much more and more clear. And the models getting smarter isn't going to change that, in my opinion.

**[13:47]** I agree. I like that Reddit is a community that holds each other accountable. I'd actually really

**[13:52]** like to see LinkedIn put in a dislike button. I think a lot of us could use that on the platform.

**[13:58]** But but I think you're right. I think there's there's a really high value to the currency of

**[14:04]** authenticity right now. And I think AI is exasperating that dynamic, where Reddit really

**[14:13]** holds that true. I'm curious, though, Lila, maybe in your perspective, this is a relatively complex

**[14:21]** product to build in a meaningful way. And how do you make sure that you're building something

**[14:28]** that isn't setting up your customers for failure, or just getting banned out of the Reddit community

**[14:34]** altogether? Yeah. So just to add on the previous question, which also answers this one, I think

**[14:42]** it's important to see that Reddit is a player highly incentivized to keep his content as human

### 14:47 — Why Reddit is structurally incentivized to stay human

**[14:47]** as possible. LinkedIn, they're making their money from ads, and they're making their money from

**[14:52]** subscriptions. Reddit, they make most of their money with data contract with Google and for

**[14:56]** picking up an AI. So Reddit will be very picky at what is high quality content. And first of all,

**[15:06]** lately, we've seen like the call email subreddit being entirely banned, because it was not properly

**[15:11]** being moderated. And that's a very good signal. Because you have like multiple layers. First,

**[15:16]** you have like Reddit company, highly incentivized at keeping its contest to its content of the

**[15:22]** highest quality possible, then you have the moderators that maintain a specific subreddits

**[15:27]** same, if they don't keep their content fine, they'll get banned by Reddit. And people will go less on

**[15:34]** the subreddit because they will not be satisfied with what they're reading and the community

**[15:39]** overall. So it's like you have multiple layers of people that are highly incentivized to keep the

**[15:45]** content of high, like at highest quality possible. And I think to answer your second question, this is

**[15:54]** exactly what is important in Reddit. You should not aim for automation like sending hundreds of

**[15:59]** comments on Reddit every day. What clearbox delivers is all the places where else someone

**[16:06]** is mentioning the problem you solve, else the competitor is engaging, or other similar topics

**[16:13]** where you could bring value without pitching your product. When you have this data, what

**[16:19]** what you want to do is like give it to Claude, Claude or chat DPT or whatever automation you want

**[16:25]** to understand where you should spend your time today. For example, let's say you have like 100

**[16:30]** opportunities. And five of them are on very big subreddits and the thread is already like going

**[16:36]** viral, like 5000 impressions and a lot of votes and it's been only 15 minutes, you want to comment on

**[16:43]** this one, you want to be there, you know, because you know, this thread is going to go viral and more

**[16:48]** and more people will come and read it, it will reference on Google, it will be visible on Claude

**[16:53]** and open AI like and chat DPT. So that's a matter of like, doing less, but at the right place and

**[17:03]** writing like human contents. I think that's the most important part. So even when we have this

**[17:09]** feature where people can export clear box opportunity to their Claude and chat DPT or whatever

### 17:12 — Do less, in the right place: 70 leads in week one

**[17:14]** agent, we include an impromptu like we discourage actually the agents to help the user writing

**[17:21]** message, we encourage the agent to educate the user about prioritizing their time and then writing

**[17:28]** like high value content. I think that's the most important part of like being successful on Reddit,

**[17:34]** because it really sucks when you get one account banned, you have to build your reputation again,

**[17:38]** you have to build karma. You really don't want that. On the other hand, like if you're just posting

**[17:44]** just 510 times a day, but you do right, you're gonna have like the cumulative effects of your

**[17:51]** work every day because more people are going to see it is going to be visible to AI agents.

**[17:56]** And you will even find direct leads, like on clear box, you have direct leads, there's

**[18:01]** hands of people, for example, on our first week of using clear box for clear box, because like 70

**[18:07]** leads, just for ourselves, like 70 people clearly mentioning on on Reddit, I need help with

**[18:14]** distribution and help with Reddit marketing. And just that, even if you ignore competitors and

**[18:21]** game engagement opportunities, it's already like so much value, especially if you're an early

**[18:26]** business trying to validate your market trying to find your first customers, it's just people

**[18:29]** openly complaining about the problem you solve. I'm curious, internally, who tend to be the

**[18:39]** operators who are going in responding to these subreddits, prioritizing those or go to market

**[18:47]** engineers handling this? Is a marketing team handling it? Do you need product experts?

**[18:52]** How are you seeing teams kind of operationalize this strategy?

**[18:57]** It's a good question. So what we're very much seeing is and it's funny, because we just had

**[19:02]** this conversation before the call, as far as, you know, really where the value sits for go for

**[19:07]** clear box, because if you're like, I'm a go to market engineer. So for me, like, or for the few

**[19:12]** go to market engineers that are working with the tool, it really is the API, it's being able to

**[19:17]** pull it out and be able to a know who, like, if I have 70 opportunities, I want at minimum,

**[19:24]** me personally, like, I want to comment at least five times a day naturally.

**[19:29]** But then there's, you know, there could be 60, depending on my offering, and depending on the

**[19:33]** amount I have, there might be other things that I want to do with that data, maybe I want to create

**[19:39]** content for SEO, geo purposes, because a lot of the posts and the content that, you know,

**[19:47]** how, where do I find my first users on Reddit, or something like that, that can be reverse

**[19:52]** engineered into how to find your first, you know, users on Reddit as a, you know, in a blog format.

**[20:01]** And for me, it's easy, because it's like a very easy channel to find people that are looking

**[20:07]** for this. But we also have users that have very like niche tech, like we have a user that's also,

**[20:14]** she's a consultant for a law firm, and she's also building her own law tech. So while she's able to

**[20:21]** read some subreddits like, like our SaaS and startup where, you know, it's not about law tech,

**[20:30]** but people are asking about compliance laws and things like that, she's able to use that data,

**[20:36]** where it's not maybe a direct lead, or there can be. So, you know, the API in that sense is like,

**[20:42]** my opinion, it's probably one of the strongest things. Also, I feel like we are coming into this

**[20:47]** place where as important is to have a valid UI that shows and shares with your teams, the real

**[20:53]** operators that are coming in, are saying, hey, what can I do with the API that keeps that I can

**[21:00]** respect the UI, but I have 100 other processes, I'm connected to Slack, like, like I said, when I,

**[21:06]** when I when I left my agency, it's because, you know, you're connected to Slack, ClickUp,

**[21:11]** chatgbt as a chat, Claude, and whatever other five other tools, and they were all siloed.

**[21:19]** And this was like back in like December last year, then it started being, oh, I can do this

**[21:24]** with cursor and MCPs. And that was cool. But then you would hit limits. And I was like,

**[21:30]** hard to justify telling my agency that I spent $200 in the first week of just like in Richmond.

**[21:36]** So I ate that one up. But that's how I learned more about context engineering, how you can,

**[21:42]** like really use the APIs and the terminal and the CLI. And it was like, oh, we can do this with

### 21:48 — The karma gate and the "scroll and speak" weekend

**[21:48]** Reddit. But like, I also joke that the first time I tried to grow on Reddit, I tried to automate the

**[21:54]** process. I tried to see if I can get the Reddit API, because Claude will tell you, yeah, you can

**[21:59]** just get it. And it might take you 24 hours, mind you, 24 hours, maybe $10,000. But Claude failed

**[22:06]** to mention that, which is a funny story. And I wasn't the only one who went through that whole

**[22:11]** thing. So it was funny just seeing other people do it. But my best thing was a weekend where I just

**[22:16]** said, screw it. I'm going to really just go into the channels and just scroll and speak is how I

**[22:22]** called it. I was like, if I don't have nothing to say, I won't say it. If there's something

**[22:26]** interesting and I can share value or share my take or my advice, I would. And literally it was about

**[22:33]** three, four days. And again, with Reddit, there's this thing called the karma gate. Right. So you

**[22:39]** gain karma by people upvoting your comments or your posts. But usually most subreddits won't

**[22:46]** accept you to even post until you have at minimum, say like 50 karma to 100. Some are about 100.

**[22:53]** So, you know, the idea is like with clear box, you can absolutely use it to build your karma

**[22:59]** and grow your community because we're basically we're sharing the the places that you can scroll

**[23:06]** and speak without having to think. And on top of that, the AI becomes more of a suggestive engine

**[23:12]** and then just another data layer that can say, hey, this is what my buyers are talking today.

**[23:17]** Right. Like, you know, I look at it like this. If you're reading clear box for your ICP

**[23:23]** and maybe, you know, your ICP or sales folks and, you know, you can imagine in Q1 right before

**[23:31]** President's Day, you know, President's Club comes in. Those subreddits might have a lot more data or

**[23:39]** sentiment onto something. Right. You know, the seller is trying to close his quota, but he's

**[23:44]** complaining about I can't find the 10 deals in my CRM. He might mention that more and then might

**[23:50]** have more people agree with him on, you know, different seasonal times. Right. You know,

**[23:55]** Christmas or summertime. Things are slow right now. People are on vacation. It's like,

**[24:00]** what are what are your buyers talking about during the summertime? And then it's like,

**[24:04]** yeah, there are leads, but they're also, you know, content. And one of the biggest also things I

**[24:10]** always say to people about the lead or the person asking for your tool in Reddit is it's not just

**[24:17]** one person because he's asking me in the subreddit. He's validating that that there's a need to the

**[24:23]** 10 or 50 or 100 other lurkers that might be just viewing that. So like I'm very much also the one

**[24:32]** like me and him, we I share screenshots of him every day. And, you know, we roll back feedback.

**[24:38]** One of my biggest things is I have a co-founder that I trust to the bone and not just on features,

**[24:45]** but on email copy and everything. It's like, I don't send an email before I get his critique

**[24:51]** on it. And then usually I will take his critique. And it was one of the hardest things for me

**[24:56]** growing up was taking people's critique. So, you know, having a co-founder that I trust to the

**[25:00]** point where, you know, I embrace the critique is almost like it's like an interesting factor. But

**[25:07]** yeah, so I'll pause there on my point. No, I have a similar relationship with our COO who happens to

**[25:16]** be my childhood best friend. He's the best fan of my wedding. He's the godfather of my kids. So him

**[25:22]** and I are super close. And that is one thing that him and I do all the time. We'll screenshot a

**[25:27]** Slack we're about to send. We screenshot an email we're about to send and be like, Hey, is this right?

**[25:32]** And I think the people you trust, they have taste too. Like, Oh, this word, don't use that word.

**[25:37]** That's kind of an applying XYZ or take that out, or don't use the punctuation this way. We used to

**[25:43]** use them dashes a lot. Now we take them all out because people think that we use AI to write

**[25:47]** everything. But I think it's important to have that relationship. And I think that is something

**[25:54]** where it's important to eat. And I don't, I don't necessarily think you should manufacture this too

**[26:02]** much. But it is important to signal that this thing that's being written is authentic. And on Reddit

**[26:10]** in particular, I think that's going to be really important for you to get upvotes, keep your karma

### 26:13 — How to fail at Reddit: warmed accounts and bad research

**[26:13]** where you need it to be. What are some of the biggest ways you could fail at Reddit? Because I

**[26:20]** assume there are so many companies that go, all right, awesome. There's lots of leads, lots to

**[26:27]** build the pipeline up and Reddit. So we're just going to go all out and start blasting into the

**[26:34]** Reddit world. And I'm assuming they just kind of run themselves into brick wall. If you were giving

**[26:40]** any advice to a company, that's like, all right, I'm going to start start making Reddit a part of

**[26:44]** our strategy. What are like the top things that you need to absolutely avoid? I would say so A is

**[26:51]** absolutely making sure you do the research as far as which are the right subreddits where,

**[26:56]** you know, the people that are going to interact with you are there are subroutes, like, especially

**[27:02]** if you're, you're some you're in B2B sass, you're a marketer, you are trying to grow, you are going

**[27:08]** to be trying to promote in any in some capacity or the other. So you have to kind of be able to read

**[27:13]** that room where, you know, there's new subreddits popping up every day that do embrace sharing

**[27:18]** build sharing promotion. But one thing I do always say, like a lot when a user asked me should I buy

**[27:25]** warmed accounts or buy multiple accounts? And I say no to that. The reason why is one strong

**[27:32]** account, I didn't even know that was a thing. Is there is there a marketplace for warmed up Reddit

**[27:36]** accounts that yeah, you can go by are a few companies I won't name names. But yeah, it's

**[27:42]** just one of those things where they either have built their own accounts, and then they'll use

**[27:46]** them to help up your community. But Reddit is very, very like onto that. It's like, in a way

**[27:54]** where they're looking to catch you, right? They're looking for the gotchas. But if you don't have any,

**[27:58]** then you're almost like free reign. Like one of the biggest things I always recommend with Reddit

**[28:03]** to to like users is diversify yourself. Meaning, you don't just have to use Reddit as a growth

**[28:08]** channel, you can just use it for your own personal, like interest or gains. Like for example, I love

**[28:15]** this one example where I bought a new digital camera a few months back. And it was like a Fujifilm,

**[28:22]** but I just bought the bare camera and I needed a lens for it. So I was like, I don't know which lens

**[28:26]** to buy. I'm like new to photography, I'm trying to figure it out. So Google, hey, I just bought the

**[28:31]** Fujifilm XM5. What's the best lens for me to do in room vlogging? Sure enough. Four different

**[28:38]** citations all from Reddit threads where real users are giving real advice as far as, yeah, no,

**[28:45]** you can use the pancake lens, but this is going to be the trade off. And then you get like an AI

**[28:50]** consensus on, hey, this is your budget of these four. This is probably the best one. And I'm like,

**[28:56]** I trust that. I bought that lens based on that recommendation. But it was real. It's like, you

**[29:02]** know, people in those channels aren't necessarily going to use AI slop to give recommendations

**[29:06]** because it's natural to them to be helpful, right? Like, oh, somebody's asking about the Fujifilm,

**[29:12]** I bought it three months ago. It was awesome. Let me tell them about it. And I think that same concept

**[29:17]** can very much apply to B2B SaaS. And for me, it does. Like I very much like, I have one company

**[29:24]** that I like, I have a signed contract with as a vendor where I, you know, I do content for them,

**[29:29]** but I do content about pretty much every single tool I use. If the tool helps me win or helps me

**[29:36]** get from point A to point B 30 minutes faster than it would have been like six months ago,

**[29:41]** and I'm going to promote it on LinkedIn on Reddit, and I'm going to share the value. So it's like,

**[29:47]** yeah, I share value on clearbox, but because I diverse and I share value on so many other

**[29:53]** aspects, no one's going to call me an astroturfer or say that because I'm not one. I genuinely use

**[29:58]** the channel, not just for selfish reasons. And I think that's one of the biggest advice is I can

**[30:05]** give people is, you know, like, it's like anything else, right? You get what you give, and that's why

**[30:10]** it's called karma too, right? I think karma is one of the best names you can give something like this

**[30:14]** because karma is a real thing, you know, you give, you get. And the other big thing, like I've seen

**[30:22]** is like, you know, everybody thinks, oh, you have to backlink on Reddit in order for people to

**[30:26]** cite you. You actually don't even have to backlink. If I just reference clearbox in a useful way,

**[30:33]** like, Hey, I found this thread. I'm also using my own tool clearbox, which helps me surface

### 30:35 — You don't need a backlink to get cited

**[30:37]** the right leads. I don't have to say clearbox.to. A will get cited. And B, I see a lot of times

**[30:45]** people will just genuinely be like, Hey, can I get the link? So, you know, dropping a link in

**[30:52]** certain channels is perfectly acceptable. But I'm always and I and this is part of what I share in

**[30:57]** my playbook is live examples, because, you know, I build and I post on Reddit because I like it.

**[31:03]** But I also feel like it's not like, like, almost like not the obligation, but one of my duties as

**[31:08]** somebody who's, you know, building in the space in Reddit, like, why should you buy my tool if I

**[31:13]** can't prove that I'm using it to grow, right? So that was a big, that's a big thing for me. And

**[31:20]** that's why I'm like, you know, I built this Reddit playbook. And I think it's on like v4, because,

**[31:25]** you know, I use quad code to build websites and five code the websites. But my biggest thing is,

**[31:30]** I don't say, Claude, build me a website, I say, let's go through five, let's go into plan mode.

**[31:36]** And I want to run this through six phases until I'm absolutely happy with five different tests on

**[31:42]** the dev server before we push it into production. And I won't forget, I was still like dissatisfied

**[31:48]** with the playbook, but I shared it with Leela and his, the way he embraced it, and the way he liked

**[31:54]** it was like my, okay, this is something, you know, like, I'm a go to market engineer, and I can love

**[31:59]** everything I do. I need to hear from the person that I know will criticize me when he's when it's

**[32:04]** off. And it's like another thing I always say is like, if the person that's like on your team or

**[32:10]** is your co founder is always agreeing with you, that's probably the wrong co founder, you need

**[32:14]** somebody that's going to disagree and keep you honest. Because if he just agrees with everything,

**[32:20]** how do you know that he's, he's being real when he actually does like something?

**[32:25]** Yep, yep. And which it, you know, the Reddit community is like that pretty authentic, they'll

**[32:29]** give you the positive, they'll give you the negative. One thing tactically, I'm curious,

**[32:35]** the best way to approach this in most social platforms, business pages don't do very well.

**[32:41]** If you're looking at LinkedIn, if you're looking at meta, like the company page itself,

**[32:47]** usually is a poor performing page. So what tends to happen is you have people on the team that have

**[32:53]** presence on that platform that tend to lead the charge. The only issue is, of course, if they end

**[32:59]** up switching companies going somewhere else doing their own thing, they tend to take a lot of that

**[33:04]** with them. Is it a similar concept on Reddit? Or do you sometimes see companies pull off useful,

**[33:14]** like company specific users that can really stay with the business as it grows?

**[33:21]** I would say yes and no, like on Reddit, a lot of people are anonymous. But the way you're speaking,

**[33:28]** like people they want to people want to talk to people. That's why you were saying like,

**[33:32]** on X, for example, company accounts, organization level accounts, they tend to perform well, worse

**[33:39]** compared to like personal branding, like having the CEO, the CPO, or even like the engineers of

**[33:45]** the company talking about the product. It's just because you can connect to people. And on Reddit,

**[33:52]** it's pretty much the same, like Sean was talking about sharing links. If you're just on a Monday

**[33:58]** morning, you have a problem in your job, you go to Reddit, you ask a question, and you have like

**[34:01]** five people answering with a link with a product that is like not exactly the solution that you

**[34:07]** were looking for. It's just you're not going to engage with that. And you might even report

**[34:12]** these people. It was not like it's about advertisement. It sounds like advertisement.

**[34:17]** So I think on Reddit, it's different because most of the time people prefer to stay anonymous.

**[34:26]** So you don't really know if it's a person or a company, you don't really know the context

**[34:30]** of like the author. But the way they write is how you know if this is a company or not.

**[34:37]** And to summarize what Sean was saying, I would say like, don't share your links,

**[34:42]** don't share your products before people begs you about it. That's like the biggest rule on Reddit.

**[34:53]** Are there any other etiquette items, Leela, that you think would be important for people to know?

**[34:57]** So don't share your links, talk like a human, don't have AI, write your responses.

**[35:04]** But anything else that people should be aware of if they're kind of stepping in for the first time?

### 35:08 — Reddit etiquette: post the problem, not the product

**[35:09]** Yeah, I think it's very easy to be excited and say, oh, I'm going to be on all subreddits and

**[35:13]** posts everywhere, comments everywhere. You're just going to get banned. Because if you do that,

**[35:18]** unless you have like a big team and you trust a lot of people to do copywriting, you'll have to use

**[35:22]** LLMs. And I'm not saying this is not possible. For example, with Sean, we've been working on skills

**[35:28]** that make like a cloud generating copy that looks pretty much human. And we're pretty satisfied

**[35:34]** about it. But this is not something I would recommend because it requires like a lot of

**[35:39]** prompt engineering before you can come to something that just looks close to human.

**[35:43]** So I would say just don't be excited by the volume. There's so many opportunities, but start small,

**[35:48]** start with like five to 10 comments a day. You can post also, that is a great way to talk about

**[35:55]** your product or the problem you're solving. If you post about just pitching your product,

**[36:00]** that's probably not going to work. Some communities accept it, some like accept like you share the

**[36:06]** project you're building, some don't. So sometimes you want to post about the problem you're solving.

**[36:12]** Like for example, let's say we are building on Reddit, so we know a lot of things about Reddit.

**[36:17]** I could post on SaaS, the SaaS subreddit. I'm not going to come and say, "Hey, Clearbox is the

**[36:23]** solution for distribution and everything." I'm going to come and say, like talk about the problem

**[36:28]** we're solving. Like, for example, with AI and like all the noise, like everyone can create SaaS

**[36:34]** right now. And it's very hard to distribute. And so I'm going to bring my insight on how I've been

**[36:40]** using Clearbox Reddit in the last month to actually grow my SaaS. And people will ask in the comments,

**[36:48]** like, I don't even have to share the link of my startup inside of the posts. Like people will just

**[36:54]** share about it. I will engage with people. And the cool thing is that you know that if someone engages

**[36:59]** with your posts, you know that person is possibly in the same boat. You just DM them. And you're like,

**[37:07]** "Hey, by the way, I wrote that post and I ended up creating a solution, which is Clearbox." And

**[37:13]** I think this is just the smartest way of doing it, you know, like just being a real human,

**[37:18]** putting yourself in the shoes of the person commenting and asking for help. Yeah.

**[37:24]** Yeah, I just think there's going to be so much temptation to try to scale this thing. And I

**[37:31]** think it's just going to completely go up in flames for these companies that are not really like,

**[37:37]** well, first of all, they have inauthentic motives for being in these channels. And I think you have

**[37:45]** to have some type of approach where you're feeling like, "Hey, this is an opportunity for me to give

**[37:50]** real value to the market." And make the bet that the business will come if you're doing a good job

**[37:57]** at that. And it sounds like if you can at least hone in a particular brand voice or company voice

**[38:05]** and keep it to a small group of people that genuinely enjoy responding to things and then

**[38:11]** prioritizing things where they can add value to these problems, it's probably a good way to go.

**[38:16]** And you could actually, in a lot of ways, this might be one of the few platforms you could build

**[38:22]** a company dedicated user that can grow over time and doesn't leave with the person behind it.

**[38:34]** Yeah, I actually looked at it like this. We have SDRs or sales reps today that they spent half

**[38:41]** their day either cold calling and the other half sending automated emails through sales

**[38:44]** love that don't even work anymore. Especially in the big... It's like, why not? If I was a business

**[38:50]** development manager, why wouldn't I want to have my rep dedicate an hour a day to

**[38:56]** being useful in a community like Reddit? Or even if it's not Reddit, somebody might be like a

**[39:01]** sub stack or something. But that compounds in so many ways because now you have your people in the

**[39:08]** weeds that are on... You're an SDR and you're calling a VP of sales or VP of finance. You might

**[39:15]** know the product that you're trying to sell them, but you don't really understand that VP of sales.

**[39:19]** You don't understand what he's feeling on Q3 when it's holidays and he's worried about his

**[39:25]** reps hitting quota. So it's almost like it's so early and it's so new, but it's just, I guess,

**[39:34]** maybe the SDR and then the go to market engineer in me is part of the reason why I valued Reddit

**[39:40]** and saw the aha for me was that real sentiment into the buyers, what they're talking and how

**[39:47]** they're talking. Cause it's like all go to market engineers. We all know we can build a copy. We can

**[39:53]** get the best email infrastructure possible. We can make sure the list is great. But do you know what

**[40:00]** those buyers really care about just based on the features and everything? Maybe, but especially

**[40:05]** like I worked for an agency where I had seven to eight clay workspaces and then every single one,

**[40:12]** it was like, I spent more time focusing on, you know, getting the right copy and the right variables

**[40:18]** than I did building out the infrastructure that includes two weeks of warmup and everything else

**[40:24]** involved. So, um, you know, it's so early, but I really do see a world where like reps really

**[40:30]** understand that they can use Reddit correctly for their words to, you know, a like just be involved

**[40:36]** share. Like, you know, you have, um, you know, an audit list of like the best tech stack for finance,

**[40:42]** um, operators that they should use it in, in February or whatever, like things like that you

**[40:48]** can find and it will be on Reddit. And the beauty again about Reddit is that karma threshold and

**[40:53]** that ratio. So meaning if the post is valid and it's good and it's useful and you want to extract

**[41:00]** it, you're not going to extract it if it's been downvoted or everybody is just in the comments

**[41:05]** saying this is AI slop. But if everybody's saying, Hey, this is super cool. Can you share more or x,

**[41:11]** y, like, Oh, maybe there's something here that, you know, I can reverse engineer and I can use

**[41:16]** for my own copy or for my own, um, work. So it's like, we're, we're also, you know, we're talking

**[41:22]** with certain companies that have their own orchestration layer tools, like a, like a deep

**[41:26]** line or even clay where like I use clay for so long and you know, we would get the copy. We would do

**[41:32]** the research. We would run clay agents to research every domain or a fire crawl to grab it. And that

**[41:39]** gives you something, but it doesn't tell you anything about the person buying. Right. Um,

**[41:45]** you know, you know, it's interesting. So, so many brands have deep empathy and love for their

**[41:55]** customers that they just can't help but get involved in the community. And I think SAS companies

### 42:00 — SaaS lost its moat — what replaces it?

**[42:04]** has been a, it's been a very, very interesting category where they didn't have to do that.

**[42:10]** They just built something that was before a few years ago, difficult to replicate.

**[42:16]** So they had a moat in the tech that they built and they could just kind of scale it and then

**[42:21]** just scale through advertising, which is a very like at the time also cheap way to grow.

**[42:27]** But now SAS, all of those advantages that kind of put it on this special pedestal of a category

**[42:35]** have completely been wiped away. People can build their own products with Claude right away. There's

**[42:41]** some production grade stuff, of course, that, that has a little bit of a moat, but they also have to

**[42:47]** start having real domain expertise and differentiate with experience and differentiate with their

**[42:53]** service and how they show up for customers and how they serve customers. And then I think

**[42:58]** this final portion, the way SAS companies have to show up in their marketing has to be authentic.

**[43:05]** It has to be real. It has to be connected to their customers. It can't just be this advertising

**[43:10]** cannon that they hope people will click on the link and then buy the product. They have to really

**[43:16]** put in the effort, which I think a lot of these SAS companies are just not used to doing.

**[43:22]** Totally. I think when it comes to things like ads where like me and him, when we talk,

**[43:26]** we'd love to do ads, but I want to do ads when I have messaging that already lands, right? Like,

**[43:31]** it's like the whole Gary V concept where it's like, put like it with like TikToks and stuff.

**[43:36]** You can do a hundred TikToks, but the ones that get those thousand that pass that threshold and

**[43:41]** get high views, those are the ones you can double down, put the ads, put into real things because

**[43:46]** the algorithm in that sense, like if you use it, right, it doesn't lie. It's like, if people are

**[43:52]** scrolling past, that means you're not interesting. If they're scrolling for five seconds, maybe you

**[43:57]** caught them on that first hook, but it's not interesting enough. So I'm very much like learning

**[44:03]** all of those aspects of, you know, how to, you know, ensure that, you know, we share the value

**[44:09]** of Reddit because it can be interesting, but it's also how you deliver it and how you share it.

**[44:14]** Right. So it's like, you know, you know, when your co-founder signed up for Clearbox,

**[44:21]** you know, normally that's like the product guys thing where he sees the signups, but, you know,

**[44:26]** I'm a go to market engineer. I was like, Lila, let me get the, not just postdoc. I have the key to

**[44:31]** convex, the read one, not write one, but just enough so I can understand our, our client data,

**[44:37]** our product data, like who's using Clearbox the right way? Who's not? You know, ideally, I always

**[44:43]** say like to every user, when I speak to them, I want you to win with this tool. Like, you know,

**[44:48]** and because, you know, we're in that situation where Reddit as a growth channel is new, you know,

**[44:55]** anybody else can build what we're building. It's not hard to build a Reddit scraper,

**[44:58]** but not everybody can, not everybody has spent the last, you know, half a year really like diving

**[45:06]** in, posting, commenting, interacting, engaging with people, testing things that work, showing

**[45:12]** even the failures. Like I keep my posts and my comments all public for a reason because, you know,

**[45:19]** while most of my posts and comments do good, some don't, some might have gotten down voted now,

**[45:23]** leave it there because I'm not hiding anything. I want people to see what's working and what's not

**[45:28]** working. I think that's super important, that transparency. And, you know, again, it's, we're

**[45:34]** in an era where anybody can take a weekend with a cloud code session and really build something

**[45:39]** cool, but can you distribute that? Can you make it secure? Can you sell it to other people? You know,

**[45:45]** like my first user was Leela, fortunately. And that's, you know, that's why we got to this point,

**[45:52]** like, you know, and yeah, so it's, it's, it's just really cool. But, you know, it's one of those

**[45:59]** things where, you know, you do it right and you, you take the time and the research and that word

**[46:05]** karma really does just come into play in so many ways with the, with the whole Reddit world.

**[46:11]** Like distribution has always been a big thing. And, but you, you just said it like, before

**[46:17]** shown talks, like more than ever, you have to be connected with the audience. You have to have

**[46:23]** empathy. You have to show like, you're really understanding the problems because there's just

### 46:28 — The new SaaS model: distribution, cost, and speed

**[46:28]** so much noise, like everyone can create a SAS in a few minutes. And that's true. Like anyone could

**[46:34]** create like a clear box competitors in a minute, probably not in a minute, because the main value

**[46:41]** we bring is cost optimization. So I think that's also a great insight. I know if this audience is

**[46:46]** made of founders, but I've spent a lot of time in the last month questioning myself on where is the

**[46:54]** place I can bring the most value to people in companies right now is SAS just dead. And I have

**[47:03]** to move to something else is SAS evolving to something. And so my conclusion is that distribution

**[47:09]** is more important than ever. And as you said, you need to like be with your audience, engage with

**[47:14]** communities, advertisement, cold email, they still work. They're just very expensive, especially if

**[47:20]** you're if you're starting. And the two other things is cost and speed. No one wants to learn

**[47:29]** a SAS that is super complex. And you have like a huge learning curve, you have to work on it for

**[47:34]** an entire month before you can get any value. And that's speed and costs like, first of all,

**[47:43]** with Clearbox, if you wanted to ask cloud code right now, like build me a Reddit scraper, that

**[47:50]** is going to surface up on the opportunities for my business, you can do it, you're going to plug like

**[47:55]** API, whatever, and cloud is going to pull all that data and run else the cloud code SDK or whatever

**[48:04]** model to analyze every single comment, it's going to cost you like $5,000 a month minimum. And on

**[48:10]** Clearbox, it costs you $75 a month. Or you will have to use less precise approach like keywords

**[48:15]** matching or semantic search, which we've discarded because they have shown to contain a lot of noise.

**[48:20]** And when you open Clearbox, you know that 90% of the things you see, they're just signal, they're

**[48:26]** just value, you might decide to invest your time on them or not. But at least you're not losing your

**[48:32]** time on something that is clearly someone not talking about your problem or not your competitors

**[48:37]** or not an engagement opportunity, you know, it's like, you have signal, then you decide.

**[48:43]** So I think that's where SAS is going, enabling agents that enable people,

**[48:50]** or like very minimalistic. First of all, I like the new product that Landlist is releasing. It's

**[48:56]** like every day you get 10 leads, which are the 10 people in the market that today are have the

**[49:03]** highest intent, basically in your product. It contrasts so much with like the previous model

**[49:09]** of like building lists of 1000s of people and like reaching out to call the email is like no,

**[49:13]** you just have 10 people and just focus your time on them. Because these people are already overwhelmed.

**[49:18]** So find a way to reach out to them, give them a call, send them a message on LinkedIn,

**[49:24]** build personalized message like this 10 people's they deserve your time more than the 1000s people

**[49:30]** that were on your previous list. And I think this is where SAS is going, like cutting through the

**[49:36]** noise, allowing people to do the same thing for like 500 times cheaper, allowing people to do

**[49:42]** the same thing for just 10 minutes a day, instead of like hours a day, like if you had to scroll

**[49:48]** Reddit every day, instead of using Clearbox, you would not do that. That would be just so

**[49:54]** much time consuming with Clearbox, you just open your inbox, and you have all these opportunities

**[49:59]** just sitting here for you. And that's like a no brainer, you know, like paying 75 bucks a month to

**[50:06]** have all this value, like save $5,000, being able to just spend 10 minutes on Reddit every day and

**[50:13]** make it one of your main distribution channel. That's like a no brainer, like $75, even less than

**[50:18]** what you pay for lead agency, you know, for a single lead. So yeah, that's my vision of it.

### 50:25 — Anthony's take: SaaS isn't dead, it's becoming a service

**[50:25]** I'm curious what you think about about all of that. I definitely do not think SAS is dead. I think

**[50:30]** we're just going to get more sober valuations of what they're actually worth as a business and as

**[50:38]** a company. And for all the reasons that you mentioned, so it takes time, even if you could

**[50:44]** build it, I could build 20 billion things, it's possible for me to go into terminal and build

**[50:49]** whatever the hell I want. It doesn't mean I should. There's a few things that are really core to me

**[50:56]** and my business and things where we have exceptional domain expertise and exceptional value

**[51:04]** that we have spent years going into potholes, tripping over ourselves and taking that experience

**[51:12]** to build things that have all that experience baked in. And I think that's where SAS is going. I

**[51:17]** think SAS is really going to move more to a service industry. So people who build these products,

**[51:25]** they're really service companies because they're aiming, they're forming their expertise into

**[51:32]** something that is repeatable, which is very similar to a consulting company or a service company.

**[51:39]** Like you have all of your expertise, you build it into frameworks, you build it into things that

**[51:44]** you can then use. Now it's just a new way of doing that. I think the foundations of SAS and AI are

**[51:52]** almost like everyone has access to Excel. Everyone has access to PowerPoint or Google Sheets, Google

**[51:57]** Slides, whatever. But that's not really the secret sauce. The secret sauce is what do you put on that

**[52:03]** canvas and what problem are you aiming that brain power towards to solve for someone? And I think

**[52:10]** that only comes when you have deep empathy for your customer, a group of people that are experiencing

**[52:15]** a problem or they have aspirations and you build something that's just for them. And then you find

**[52:21]** ways to get involved in the world that they're living. I think that's where SAS is going. And

**[52:26]** I think that's a good thing. I think we had overvalued bloated valuations, people spending

**[52:33]** money on nonsense. And now it's, hey, let's let the real companies adding value in the market

**[52:39]** survive and they will. And it gives an opportunity to have even more diversity of product

**[52:45]** and customization to meet the market's needs better.

**[52:52]** I agree. It's like, you know, the concept that just because people are now using AI to build that

**[52:57]** they're, you know, they're doing less or being less productive. Most people, if you ask them if

**[53:02]** they've been in the terminal for the past six months, they're spending more hours building

**[53:06]** and more time working and reiterating because now it's like, oh, there's so much more I can do,

**[53:12]** you know, a software like I've spoken to real software, senior software engineers and,

**[53:18]** you know, seven, eight years in the industry. And they're like, yeah, I embraced coding agents

**[53:23]** two years ago and I haven't looked back. I'm more productive. I love my job more because

**[53:29]** it lets me do more than I was ever capable. I've heard people say that they were CS majors and

**[53:34]** dropped out of programming completely. And then once they started realizing they can do this with

**[53:39]** coding agents, it's like, okay, this is how my brain works. It's like, my brain is not wired to,

**[53:45]** you know, type out every single code base, but I understand programming. I understand the

**[53:49]** functionality of, you know, the components and why this should click and this should turn this to

**[53:55]** that. So, you know, the ability to be able to do that is just great, but there's also groundedness

**[54:01]** into it too, right? Like, yeah, I five coded or, you know, built the features for the original

**[54:07]** version, but I wasn't delusional, delusional enough to think that, Hey, I should just, you know,

**[54:12]** go out in the market and try and sell this. Like, let me find the right team or the right person to,

**[54:18]** you know, make sure that if we have a hundred people giving us a credit card, I'm not, you know,

**[54:23]** letting somebody hack into my Mac mini and take that information, God forbid. So, you know, there

### 54:29 — The Gemma quantization story

**[54:29]** was that, but like, I would say this, he's too humble. One of the biggest things that he was

**[54:33]** able to do for clear boxes. And in reality, this is why we're still even running right now is that

**[54:40]** we have, he built his own local inference model. Like, I'm not sure if you're familiar with,

**[54:45]** when Google released the Gemma model, it was a, it's a local open source model that they released.

**[54:52]** And I can't tell the story like he can, but I'll just keep it short and he can maybe explain it

**[54:56]** better, but he was able to quantize that model so that he can reduce the, you know, the math in it

**[55:02]** and put it into a GPU that can run clear box for us. And it's funny cause I can look at the engine

**[55:09]** every day and see the cost for, you know, if you have a thousand users and even if half of them

**[55:15]** are on a paid trial and a lot of companies have that, if you're running on a chat UBT wrapper,

**[55:21]** you can, you can lose your runway and go out really quick. And one of the, like it's, it's,

**[55:27]** it's everything. It's not one of, but just, you know, the props to him, I'd love for him to explain

**[55:32]** it a little better than I can, but I always joke back to the WhatsApp message. I can even just

**[55:37]** read it real quick. I got from him in, I remember that one. Yeah. He's like, by the way, I'm with my

**[55:45]** grandma. I didn't have much time to work, but I quantized Gemma for 31 B and optimized it for

**[55:52]** our use case. I managed to have her running for 10 X cheaper than via API. This is back in March.

**[55:58]** Super casual. Just a very average sizing a Gemma model over the weekend. He drops it on hugging

**[56:06]** face. And I think now it's at almost a million downloads, but I'd love for him to just give you

**[56:11]** like the TLDR on the story. Cause I think it's honestly one of the coolest things. Of course.

**[56:16]** Yeah. I think this is a great insight also for this audience. Like,

**[56:20]** and that also intersects with the value that SAS can provide with models, like

**[56:28]** time and human labor can be automated. And that's the thing. And that's also very

**[56:32]** counterintuitive with the fact that we were saying SAS are evolving towards service because service,

**[56:38]** something that can be automated now, but it's not about automation like in SAS. It's about like

**[56:43]** relationship and empathy as we were, as we were discussing, but there's a lot of, a lot of things

**[56:48]** in a company that can be automated. And right now, if you use state of the art models, like

**[56:57]** open AI and anthropic models, it's just going to be so expensive that it's almost discouraging

**[57:03]** for you to invest the time of optimizing these processes. There is a huge potential at creating

**[57:10]** small models that are very good at something like a thousand times cheaper than the models from the

**[57:15]** big labs and like retain 95% of the intelligence on that specific task. And that's what we did.

**[57:23]** Basically I took a model from Google. I made it much smaller so I can fit in a single consumer

**[57:28]** GPU of 50, 90. That's why I went viral because people were hyped by the model and then they

**[57:33]** realized they can run it on the GPU they have at home. And so just last month, I think he got like

**[57:38]** 600k than loads. Yeah, it went crazy. We got reposted by the hugging face and Google researcher.

**[57:47]** And we got like a million views on Twitter just for that model. But that's a very great insight

**[57:54]** for people like how can you help your users, your company do the same thing, the exact same thing

**[58:00]** they're already doing, but for like much cheaper. And that's the cost aspect, you know, with Clearbox,

**[58:07]** it will be very hard to leverage Reddit. If you had to do it yourself with like the big labs model,

**[58:14]** it would just be too expensive. It would probably be fine for an enterprise. You don't mind paying

**[58:18]** 20k a month if it's going to bring you like 200k a year contracts here and there. But if you're a

**[58:26]** startup, if you're anything lower than a big enterprise, you do mind. You don't want to spend

**[58:30]** 20k a month on something you don't know is going to work. And yeah, I think that's, that's definitely

**[58:38]** something I'm even thinking of, like how there's this I see so many processes that can be automated

**[58:45]** in companies. Yeah, there's things I cannot share, but I'm talking with big companies also. And

**[58:54]** they're like, they're talking about this right now. And they're probably going to build that

**[59:00]** internally. But I think there's a big potential for a startup assess also to come and optimize

**[59:06]** the cost for them. I've seen something recently, what was that? Oh, was it post hog?

**[59:14]** Yeah, I think post hog, you know, post hog, they're like pivoting right now. For a long time,

**[59:19]** they were just this big analytics company plus things you can like tools to help running your

**[59:28]** products, like feature flags, A/B testing and stuff like that. Now they're pivoting towards

**[59:34]** this being this hub, where you can automate your entire business and keep track of all the agents.

**[59:39]** And so your business will be auto improving. So your engineers, they don't spend time on like the

**[59:45]** small issues that customers are bringing every day, for example, they spend time, like being

**[59:50]** innovative, being even better at what you're really doing. And that makes a lot of sense. I think

**[59:57]** post hog is a very big company. And that's not for no reason that they're

**[1:00:00]** pivoting towards this new messaging of being the hub where you cannot make your business basically.

**[1:00:08]** Yeah, I think it just speaks to the fact that there's going to be a lot of opportunities. And

**[1:00:14]** you can solve problems for people in a more efficient way in a more effective way, too.

### 01:00:21 — Efficiency has a limit. Effectiveness doesn't.

**[1:00:21]** I think I talk a lot about this, like I, it's fine that AI can provide some efficiency.

**[1:00:27]** The things that always get me excited are how do I get more effective? How do I do this better?

**[1:00:32]** Because there's a limiting rate to how efficient you can be, but how effective you can be is almost

**[1:00:41]** unlimited. So I think anything that we can do to say, let's just do this thing better. And I think

**[1:00:47]** that's where SaaS companies, service companies, anyone can start, yes, leveraging AI, building

**[1:00:53]** local models that can do the job better and more efficiently. I think there's going to be so much

**[1:01:00]** opportunity for that. So there's a lot of doomers out there right now. I'm not one of them. I know

**[1:01:08]** there's going to be some pain, like you don't go through a major transition without some societal

**[1:01:13]** pain. But when we get through to the other side, I think it's just better. So I'm excited for it and

**[1:01:19]** having a ton of fun with it right now. And I really appreciate what you guys are doing. I think

**[1:01:25]** Reddit is a unique universe full of authenticity that is lacking in so many other platforms and so

**[1:01:35]** many other venues and forums that people are going into to where it's like the last

**[1:01:41]** bit of humanity out in the social network right now. So I think what you're doing to help people

**[1:01:48]** and brands connect with the right people and connect in the right way is massively valuable.

**[1:01:56]** So I really appreciate everything you're doing. And I really appreciate everything you shared

### 01:02:00 — Where to find Clearbox

**[1:02:00]** on the podcast today. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Maybe as a closing note,

**[1:02:06]** if there's anyone in the audience interested in Reddit, our teams are likely going to work

**[1:02:12]** together. We're exploring right now the service aspects because we know Reddit can be overwhelming

**[1:02:16]** for people and that also intersects with what you were saying like SaaS are evolving towards service.

**[1:02:22]** And your your co-founder also looked very interested in like spending more time

**[1:02:29]** on Reddit and leveraging that as a distribution channel. Just go on LinScale website and or

**[1:02:37]** Clearbox website and we'll be cool. It's free. We're cool guys. Worst case scenario will give

**[1:02:42]** you a lot of value and best case scenario Reddit might become one of your best channel ever.

**[1:02:49]** And I always like to say just one more thing. Right now I chase down every user that signs up

**[1:02:56]** because I have access to the keys. So if you do sign up, you will likely get a message for me

**[1:03:02]** saying, hey, thanks for signing up. And I'm here to help jump on a call with you share. And

**[1:03:07]** my whole thing is I want you to win with the tool. So yeah, I'll close off there.

**[1:03:15]** That's fantastic. I love it. Well, it's hyper relevant for us at LinScale for our own

**[1:03:20]** business and growth. I know it's going to be unbelievably relevant for the companies that we

**[1:03:24]** work with. And I appreciate everything you're doing, everything you shared and can't wait

**[1:03:29]** to see what you guys do next. Thank you. Thank you, Anthony, so much for for setting this up

**[1:03:36]** and being on it. We're excited to work with you guys together and help you guys win just as much.


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_LeanScale Knowledge Hub. Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast (https://www.leanscale.team)._