I Built a CLI That Finds Me Clients on Reddit Using AI

tl;dr — I got tired of manually scrolling Reddit for people asking "who can build me a landing page?" so I built a Rust CLI that scans subreddits, uses AI to score buying intent, and hands me a ranked list of leads. Open source, runs locally, works with Ollama or any cloud AI provider.

The Problem

I'm a freelancer. Half my clients come from Reddit — someone posts in r/SaaS or r/startups asking for help, and I reply. Simple.

Except it's not simple. The workflow looks like this:

1. Open Reddit


2. Scroll through 6 subreddits


3. Read every post


4. Ignore 95% of them


5. Maybe find 1-2 posts where someone is actually looking to hire


6. By the time you find them, 3 other freelancers already replied

It's a full-time job just to find leads. And the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible — most posts are people venting, sharing links, or asking questions they don't need help with.

I wanted a tool that does the scrolling for me and only shows me posts where someone is ready to spend money.

What Cypher Does

Cypher is a terminal tool that:

• Scans subreddits you're watching


• Filters posts by keyword match first (cheap, fast)


• Sends matching posts to AI for signal extraction (intent, budget, urgency)


• Scores each lead 0-100


• Shows you a ranked table in the terminal

You tell it what you do in one sentence. It suggests subreddits to watch and keywords to filter by. Then you just run cypher scan when you're ready to find leads.

The Stack

Language: Rust — because I wanted it fast and I wanted a single binary I could cargo install and forget about.

Reddit data: key (free tier works)

What I'd Do Differently

A few things I'd change if I rebuilt this:

1. 
   Webhook alerts — instead of just terminal output, send high-score leads to Slack or Telegram. I'm building this next.


2. 
   Reply templates — store pre-written responses per subreddit. When you find a lead, one key to copy a tailored reply.


3. 
   Historical scoring — track how your lead quality changes over time. Are you getting better at finding clients, or just finding more noise?


4. 
   Multi-profile — right now it's one profile per config. If you offer multiple services, you need separate configs.

Why Open Source

I built this because I needed it. I'm not trying to turn it into a SaaS — it runs locally, on my machine, with my API keys. If you find it useful, use it. If you want to add features, open a PR.

GitHub: — a Reddit data proxy that handles rate limits, parsing, and anti-bot measures. If you're building anything that needs Reddit data, check it out.