Banned on Reddit, Selene Lee still got SocialCrawl its enterprise customers there

Selene Lee is the founder of SocialCrawl, a social media scraping API. When she recorded this episode it was past $10K MRR. By October 24, 2026, it had made $40,085 in the last 30 days, verified through Stripe.

She came from academia, and SocialCrawl wasn't her first product. The earlier ones failed. The difference this time wasn't the code. It was that people already knew who she was when she launched.

Her earlier products failed on distribution

Before SocialCrawl, Selene didn't post on social media and had never talked in front of a camera. She was focused on building, and she thought marketing and distribution weren't her job.

So she outsourced them. She says she wasted thousands of dollars hiring people and spent money on ads, trying to take the easy route.

I guess there is no easy way for distribution. You really have to get your hands dirty and try to build that online presence.

This time she started before launch. She had about 5,000 followers on Threads and about 1,000 on X, where she was building in public. Not a big audience, but enough to kick off the first wave of users.

Threads for reach, X for community

She picked Threads because indie hackers and developers kept calling it a blue ocean. X, Instagram and TikTok felt saturated. Threads was early, its algorithm was pushing new profiles, and a small account had a better chance of going viral.

She's less active there now and isn't sure how it works today. Her advice: start building in public on X, where that community is biggest, and add Threads if you want more exposure.

Banned on Reddit, and still her best enterprise channel

Selene got banned on so many subreddits that she lost count, including the biggest SaaS subreddit. In her experience the start is the hardest part and it gets easier the more you post. Promoting your own product stays hard, because people can smell a pitch from miles away.

SocialCrawl sells to businesses, so she assumed LinkedIn would matter most, and she's starting a LinkedIn outreach channel now to win bigger enterprise deals. But when she spoke with five of their enterprise customers over a couple of weeks, four of the five had found SocialCrawl through Reddit.

I think in this age, like the B2C marketing, B2B sales, the lines are really blurred.

Her conclusion: exposure matters more than the channel you'd expect for your market. Be loud about what you're building.

Get comfortable on camera

Asked what she'd tell someone just starting out, she said to get more confident posting content and talking on camera. AI makes it easy to write anything and to generate videos and images, so a real person talking on camera is getting rarer, and people value it more.

Credits instead of subscriptions

Pricing is one of the hardest calls, in her view. Price too low and people assume the product isn't good. Price too high and it feels like a burden, so nobody converts.

She researched as many API companies as she could, mostly competitors, and saw that most of them charge with credits. SocialCrawl followed the same model.

There was a second reason. People already pay for so many subscriptions that signing up for one more feels like pressure. Pay as you go credits take that pressure away.

Build what keeps coming up

SocialCrawl connects to a lot of platforms, and Selene sees that as its moat. Most of those integrations, and the features that make it different, came from customer requests.

Universal Search is the clearest example. One of their biggest enterprise customers kept making repeated API calls to search for the same thing on different platforms, wasting calls and credits. So SocialCrawl built a search that runs the same query across tens of platforms in a single API call.

She doesn't build everything users ask for. In her previous SaaS she tried to make everyone happy, and the product got messy and drifted far from what she set out to make. Now she keeps a clear vision, builds only what fits it, and waits for the same request to come up again and again.

Product Hunt, one blog post and SEO

SocialCrawl launched on Product Hunt and didn't get many upvotes. She'd still launch there, because it helps with SEO.

The blog has done more. One post published in May still brings in a lot of their traffic. Her point is that one strong post can carry your SEO for months. Reddit helps with SEO too.

She was new to SEO, so she connected Google Search Console to Claude, right when Fable came out, and asked it how to improve her SEO and GEO.

Make it easy for AI agents to use

More and more tools are used by AI agents, not only by people. What that looks like depends on what you're building. SocialCrawl does two things:

• Docs agents can read: every document on the site is set up so bots can come in and read it.
• Plugins: Selene loves finding a tool with a plugin for Codex or Claude Code, because it makes the tool much easier to use. Getting it onto the marketplace helps too.