Reddit Scout

Motivation

So when I’m looking to purchase a product, I start with reviews. I usually conduct my searches like best blender reddit and I got tired of doing that each time and combing through comments, so I built Reddit Scout.

Implementation

Reddit lets you use their API for free until you hit certain limits. So I started messing with the snoowrap package and crafting searches based on a query. I then did some further filtering to get good results before summarizing them with an OpenAI. When the API costs of that become too great, I’ll look at hosting my own LLM (Llama3.1?) and doing the summarization that way.

Next I wanted to integrate some type of monetization strategy. So I used the Amazon Products API and began querying for product keywords mentioned in the summaries to construct affiilate links.

After I did that, I added a product carousel at the top of the summary to show the products that were mentioned along with a photo.

I also implemented a programmatic SEO strategy. Every query that is performed becomes a cached slugified url, for example best mattress toppers becomes https://www.redditscout.com/best-mattress-toppers and the sitemap.xml is updated with this entry. This keeps the site growing organically with its own content which is then picked up and indexed by Google.

Issues

I encountered some issues with the Amazon affiliate link construction. I had to localize the links because I’m in Canada and the Canadian and US affiliate urls are different. I still don’t have a good solution as some products exist in the US store but not in the Canadian one.

At the moment I don’t have a good solution and it already takes a while to get a summary so conducting multiple store queries may take too long.

Future Plans

I currently have a landing page up for Reddit Scout Pro. I don’t want to veer too much from the initial product vision but I keep seeing queries for todays top news or best stock to invest in. Instead of fighting the market I’m looking at building out paid features to do this kind of analysis and subreddit summarization/tracking so people can be notified of emerging topics they may be interested in.

Conclusion

At the moment Reddit Scout is profitable and the running costs are not outweighing the profit. I plan to further monetize by building out the Reddit Scout Pro features and demoing its usability for finding winning products for Dropshipping for example to get more business-minded users.