Your first monitor

A monitor is one description of what you sell, plus the terms and subreddits to watch. Everything downstream is judged against it, so it is worth ten minutes of care.

Write the description like a person

The two long fields — what do you sell and who buys it — are the inputs the scorer uses. Write them the way you would explain the product to someone at a meetup.

This works:

Invoicing software for freelancers and solo consultants. Creates an invoice in about thirty seconds and chases late payers automatically with escalating reminders. No accounting, no bookkeeping. Flat $12/month.

This does not:

A financial operations platform empowering modern professionals to streamline their revenue workflows.

The second one matches almost nothing, because nobody on Reddit describes their problem in those words.

The who buys it field matters just as much. It is what demotes a thread full of buying signals from the wrong kind of buyer — a twelve-person company shopping for payroll software is high-intent and useless if you sell to solo freelancers.

Terms

Three kinds:

• Include — any of these can match. Use the words your buyers use, not your category name.
• Exact phrase — must appear verbatim. Good for question shapes like "how do you invoice".
• Exclude — kills the item outright, whatever else matched.

One well-chosen exclusion usually removes more noise than five extra keywords add signal. If you sell to solo freelancers, excluding payroll removes an entire category of plausible-looking near misses.

Subreddits

Add the places your buyers already talk, without the r/ prefix. Start with three to five you actually read. You can always widen after you have seen a week of results.

The score floor

The floor decides what reaches your feed and your inbox — not what gets collected. Everything matching is stored regardless, so widening a monitor later never starts from an empty history.

Start at 60. If your feed is too quiet after a week, drop to 50 before you touch the keywords: it is usually the floor, not the terms.

After you save

The first run happens within your plan's interval — daily on Free, hourly on Pro, every fifteen minutes on Growth. You will get an email digest when something clears your alert threshold, and nothing at all when there is nothing to report.