SOCIAL LISTENING
Product mention monitoring for indie founders
A person asking for help, a customer explaining a workaround, and a founder tagging your handle are three different signals. Product listening should help you tell them apart.
Start with the name and domain
Monitor your product name and website domain. A distinctive name is easier to identify than a common word. If your product is called DROP, the word “drop” alone will mostly describe unrelated things. Pair ambiguous names with product context.
Your personal handle is useful context, but every reply to your account is not a product mention. “Thanks!” under a personal post should not inflate a brand metric. Read the text before counting it.
Separate product discussion from demand
A product mention tells you someone is discussing your product. A customer opportunity tells you someone has a problem it can solve. A single dashboard can show both without pretending they mean the same thing.
Look for questions about setup, pricing, use cases, or missing capabilities. Complaints may reveal a documentation issue. Comparisons may show which alternatives buyers consider. A bare tag rarely provides enough information to act.
Reply as the person behind the product
Answer the question directly and identify your connection to the product. If you cannot verify a detail, check it before replying. A small, accurate answer builds more trust than an enthusiastic sales paragraph.
For criticism, acknowledge the specific issue and offer a concrete next step. For praise, a simple thank-you can be enough. The presence of a mention does not mean every conversation needs a promotional link.
What Start tiny monitors
Start tiny uses your website brief, product name, and domain to assess recent public X posts. Qualified product mentions and customer opportunities have separate counts and appear together in the activity chart.
Discovery runs after a website’s subscription is active. Timing adapts to remaining post allowance; it is not a complete archive of X or a guarantee that every mention will be found. You can edit intent phrases and pause discovery from your workspace. AI drafts are generated when you open a result, and you review and send them yourself on X.