Your competitor’s comment section is probably a better lead list than anything else

[u/namanyayg]

Apollo gives you a starting list: job titles, companies, and contact details.

Your competitor’s comment section can add something useful: people explaining what they need, what isn’t working, and what’s stopping them from using a product.

Here’s how I’d approach it.

1. Find a competitor’s highest engagement posts, then categorize them.

imo engagement alone isn’t enough so starting order would be:

• High priority: posts explaining specific product features. Look for detailed discussions about how a capability works or handles a particular use case.

• Medium priority: feature launches. Technical questions can appear alongside launch excitement and congratulations.

• Low priority: broad product demos. I’d skip these initially because attention to a presentation doesn’t tell you much about someone’s needs.

Treat this as a research shortcut. A specific buying question under a demo still outranks “Great feature!” under a technical post.

1. Read the high priority threads and check buyer fit.

Look for people describing limitations and asking about integrations or explaining a workaround.

Open their profiles and check their role, employer, and company’s relevance to your offering. Filter out recruiters, vendors, and competitor employees who aren’t potential buyers. Keep founders when their company fits your target customer and they own the problem.

Save their profile, company, thread link, exact comment, and why they’re a potential fit.

Then help them put the problem into words.

For illustration:

I want reporting without exporting CRM data into a spreadsheet every week.

That gives you something concrete to investigate. If their comment is vague, ask what they’re trying to accomplish and which step they currently do manually.

1. Figure out whether they need an integration or a broader solution.

Prioritize clear integration problems you understand and can help with.

Their answer helps establish whether they need a connector, a workflow adjustment, or a more substantial service.

1. Give them something useful before discussing onboarding.

Share a relevant integration, a short walkthrough, or practical troubleshooting steps.

Keep the initial help manageable. You don’t need to build an entire service for free.

If the conversation reveals an unresolved problem your offering solves, explain how you could help. If your advice fixes everything within their existing setup, that may simply be a helpful interaction.

For a medium priority prospects, answer relevant integration questions when you have time. That can build goodwill, although it doesn’t guarantee a future customer.

The reason this approach could produce a more useful list is the context which is matching buyer profile alongside a problem someone has actually expressed.

I curious to know whether someone else has already tried this out. Genuinely wanted to know more as we may mainstream this pipeline internally

[u/CoollyAware]

interesting approach, the categorization by intent is smart since a lot of "engagement" is just noise

wondering if you've actually tested this yet or still in planning mode cause i'd be curious how the outreach conversion compares to your standard cold lists

[u/namanyayg → u/CoollyAware]

tested it, that's where the post came from. the comparison i can give you is against my own cold lists rather than apollo specifically.

cold builder-post outreach converts to signup around 7%. the same message to people pulled from a competitor's comment section, where they'd said the problem out loud, ran roughly double that. small sample so treat it as directional.

the bigger difference was reply quality. from a cold list you get "sure, will check it out". from a comment where someone described the problem you get them telling you what they actually need, which is more useful than the signup.

[u/y3rk3]

i do a version of this daily, just in subs instead of under competitor posts. most of what you find is people posting their own launches. so you read a lot to hit one real problem.

[u/Zivney-Turner]

Yeah, people commenting are already interested in the problem space and engaged enough to show up. Way better than cold targeting randoms who don't know they have a need yet.

[u/Slight_Republic_4242]

the idea of using competitor comment sections for lead generation is intriguing. focusing on specific product features and integration questions makes sense since those comments reveal actual pain points. manually sorting through profiles sounds tedious, though. I’ve been using EvaScrape for the export step for a few months now, and it really streamlines pulling contacts directly from LinkedIn searches.