CueScout — Reddit, Hacker News & Quora buying leads

I audited my own account and found the product had been lying to me for a month

Someone paid for CueScout for the first time yesterday, which finally pushed me to do the thing I'd been putting off: read my own account's data in psql instead of looking at the dashboard and feeling fine about it.

The dashboard had been telling me every scan saved 11-14 new opportunities. The database said the newest post it had stored was from 17 July, four days and about fifteen scans ago. Every scan since then had re-saved posts I already had, counted them as new, and told me the scan counted toward my plan. It was also re-running AI scoring on all of them, roughly 230 calls a day to re-score the same 33 posts.

The roadmap was scheduling me to go comment on Reddit threads that were 16 to 38 days old on the day it wanted the comment written. Oldest one was from 27 May. Nobody reads a comment on a five-week-old thread, and nothing anywhere in the code treated thread age as a thing that mattered.

The daily digest had 299 "market intelligence" items in it. About 215 scored zero. Most were Show HN launches with nothing to do with my niche, filed as "recurring question" because the bucketing heuristic searched the entire post body for a question mark, and post bodies contain question marks.

The GEO feature had 12 prompts and had only ever checked four of them. The same four, every single run, since the day I set it up, because the per-run cap sliced the first N in creation order and nobody wrote a rotation. The score it exists to track had never been computed. One failing prompt returned early and skipped the snapshot, every time.

Then the one that actually stung. I looked at the keywords I'd configured for my own product: "promote my saas", "where to find customers", "first paying", "indie kit". I built a tool for finding people who want to buy a Reddit monitoring tool, and I had aimed it squarely at broke founders asking how to do marketing. The scanner was doing its job correctly. I'd told it to fish in the wrong pond.

What I fixed today

• Scans now check what they already have before scoring. A scan that finds nothing says so instead of charging you for it.
• Threads older than 7 days don't get scheduled. Recency beats the phase ordering now, so a hot buyer thread lands this week instead of in week three when it's dead.
• Inbox sorts by intent decayed for age, so a fresh 70 outranks a three-week-old 90.
• Zero-score noise no longer goes in the digest.
• GEO prompts rotate by staleness and the score gets snapshotted even if one prompt fails.
• Cross-posts collapse into one opportunity. Someone double-posting the same question in three subreddits was becoming three separate things to reply to.
• Rewrote my keywords toward what an agency actually types when they're already doing this by hand.

Most of it isn't deployed yet, and I want a few real scans through the new keyword set before I trust the numbers again. But the gap between "the dashboard says 13" and "the database says 0" is the whole reason I'm building this in the first place, so finding it in my own product was a useful kind of embarrassing.