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Community Reconnaissance

Discover, evaluate, and rank online communities where your ICP is active, then build engagement profiles for each

Reddit APIWeb SearchAttio
$npx gtm-skills add drill/community-reconnaissance

What this drill teaches

Community Reconnaissance

This drill maps the online communities where your ICP participates, evaluates them for engagement potential, and produces a ranked target list with engagement profiles. It runs once at the start of the play and is refreshed quarterly.

Input

  • ICP definition (firmographics, job titles, pain points, triggering events) from the icp-definition drill
  • Your product category and the problems you solve
  • Competitor names

Steps

1. Generate keyword lists for discovery

From your ICP definition, produce three keyword lists:

Pain-point keywords — the problems your ICP talks about:

  • Extract the top 3 pain points from your ICP doc
  • For each, generate 3-5 natural-language phrases people use when describing that pain (e.g., "how do I track churn" not "churn analytics platform")
  • Include frustrated/venting variants: "tired of X", "struggling with X", "is there a better way to X"

Category keywords — what your product category is called:

  • Your product category name and synonyms
  • "best [category] tool", "[category] software recommendations", "[category] for [ICP role]"
  • Comparison queries: "[competitor] vs", "[competitor] alternative"

ICP role keywords — where your ICP identifies themselves:

  • Job titles: "startup founder", "VP of engineering", "head of growth"
  • Industry terms: "B2B SaaS", "fintech startup", "devtools"

2. Discover candidate communities

Using the subreddit-research fundamental, run searches across all three keyword lists. For each search:

  • Call the Reddit subreddit search endpoint with each keyword phrase
  • Collect all unique subreddits returned
  • Also search site:reddit.com "[keyword]" via web search to find threads in subreddits the API search might miss
  • Note which subreddits appear repeatedly across multiple keyword searches (high signal)

Target: 20-40 candidate subreddits before filtering.

3. Evaluate each candidate

For each candidate subreddit, using the reddit-api-read fundamental:

  1. Get subreddit info: GET /r/SUBREDDIT/about — extract subscriber count, active users, description, submission type
  2. Sample recent posts: GET /r/SUBREDDIT/hot?limit=25 — calculate average score, average comments, post frequency
  3. Check relevance: Read the 25 most recent posts. Count how many are directly relevant to your expertise. Calculate relevance ratio.
  4. Check rules: GET /r/SUBREDDIT/about/rules — note any restrictions on links, self-promotion, account age, or karma minimums
  5. Assess competition: Count how many of the recent posts/comments are from obvious vendors or marketers vs. genuine community members

Score each subreddit using the scoring formula from the subreddit-research fundamental (ICP fit, activity, engagement, accessibility, competition).

4. Rank and select

Sort by total score. Select:

  • Top tier (3-5 subreddits, score 35+): Primary communities for daily engagement
  • Second tier (5-8 subreddits, score 25-34): Weekly engagement, test for promotion to top tier
  • Watch list (remaining): Monitor only, engage when high-opportunity threads appear

5. Build engagement profiles

For each selected subreddit, produce an engagement profile:

## r/SUBREDDIT Engagement Profile

- **Subscribers**: X | **Active**: Y | **Posts/day**: Z
- **Score**: XX/50
- **Posting rules**: [summarize key rules]
- **Minimum requirements**: [karma, account age, flair]
- **Best content types**: [what gets upvoted here — how-tos, stories, questions, data]
- **Peak activity hours (UTC)**: [when posts get the most engagement]
- **Key recurring topics**: [pricing, hiring, churn, tooling, etc.]
- **Top contributors**: [note 3-5 regular contributors who set the tone]
- **Competitor presence**: [none / low / moderate / saturated]
- **Your angle**: [specific expertise you can offer here that isn't already covered]
- **First engagement plan**: [what your first 5 interactions should look like]

6. Store in CRM

Using the attio-lists fundamental, create an Attio list called "Community Targets" with entries for each subreddit. Include the engagement profile data as structured fields. This enables tracking engagement metrics per community over time.

Output

  • Ranked list of 10-15 target subreddits with engagement profiles
  • Attio list with community targets and metadata
  • Three keyword lists (pain-point, category, ICP role) for use in monitoring

Triggers

  • Run once at play start
  • Re-run quarterly or when ICP changes
  • Ad-hoc when a new relevant community is discovered

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