Brand Monitor: tracking what people say about your products before it becomes a problem
Every product has a Hacker News moment. Someone posts "Show HN: Company X's service deleted my data" or "Ask HN: Why is Product Y so slow this week?" or just a comment thread where your product name shows up 15 times in two hours.
If you catch it in the first hour, you can respond. If you catch it six hours later, the narrative is set.
Brand Monitor is the tool I built to catch it in the first hour.
What Brand Monitor watches
GitHub
- Issues mentioning your product or company name (open, with no response)
- Discussions in repositories you don't own
- Comments referencing your product in other projects' issues
Why GitHub specifically? Because engineers file the best bug reports there, even if you're not on GitHub. The pattern is: frustrated engineer tries your product, hits a bug, opens a GitHub issue in a dependency's repo because they think it's a bug in the dependency. Brand Monitor finds that.
Hacker News
- Submissions with your product name in the title
- Comments mentioning your product (including in unrelated threads)
- Ask HN and Show HN that reference your space
The HN window is real. A front-page mention generates comments within 10 minutes. The right response (a founder showing up with context, not defensiveness) can turn a negative thread. The wrong response (silence, or a canned PR reply) makes it worse.
- Subreddit posts mentioning your product
- Comments across any subreddit (configurable scope)
- Cross-posts
Reddit has longer decay than HN. A post on r/sysadmin comparing your product to a competitor's might surface in Google results for months.
Discord
- Public server mentions across any Discord server you've joined
- DMs in support or community servers
Twitter/X
- Mentions, quote-tweets, replies to your account
- Keyword mentions without the @ (people complaining without tagging you)
- Competitor mentions
What Brand Monitor measures
Mention velocity — rate of mentions per hour over a rolling 24h window. A spike in velocity is the first signal that something is happening. Brand Monitor classifies: NORMAL, ELEVATED, SPIKE, VIRAL. SPIKE = > 5× normal rate. VIRAL = > 20× normal rate.
Sentiment score — 0-100 per mention, aggregate trend. Not perfect, but useful for detecting when the tone of conversation shifts. A product update that generates lots of mentions at 45/100 sentiment is different from one that generates mentions at 75/100.
Source authority — HN front page is different from a personal blog. Reddit post with 500 upvotes is different from one with 3. Brand Monitor weights by platform and engagement signal.
Mention deduplication — the same story shared across platforms generates many mentions. Brand Monitor identifies the canonical source and de-dupes the downstream shares.
Health score — composite of velocity trend, sentiment, response rate (mentions you've engaged with), and recency. A-F grade. "A" means things are calm and you're responding well. "D" means something is escalating and you haven't responded.
Weekly digest — Sunday evening email summarizing the week: total mentions, sentiment trend, top sources, any unresponded threads that are still getting traction. The digest is designed to be read in 3 minutes and actioned or dismissed.
The alert anatomy
Brand Monitor sends an alert when:
- Mention velocity exceeds SPIKE threshold (> 5× rolling average)
- A mention comes from a high-authority source (HN front page, > 100 Reddit upvotes)
- A negative thread has gone unresponded for > 4 hours
- Competitor mentions spike (competitive intelligence signal)
The alert includes: platform, link, sentiment, current upvote/comment count, first 100 chars of the content. Enough to decide if it needs immediate attention without clicking through.
What it doesn't do
Brand Monitor doesn't send replies, doesn't draft responses, doesn't manage a response queue. It watches and surfaces. The response is still human.
This is deliberate. Automated responses to brand mentions are a product PR disaster waiting to happen. The value is observation, not action.
The use case that pays for itself once
If you have a product with > 100 users, you've had a moment where something went wrong and you found out too late. A support ticket storm that started as a Reddit thread. An outage that was discussed on HN for 3 hours before anyone in the company noticed. A competitor's blog post comparing your product unfavorably that got traction.
Brand Monitor doesn't prevent those. It means you find out in 20 minutes instead of 3 hours.
Brand Monitor is in early access. Free tier monitors 2 keywords on 2 platforms with weekly digest. $29/mo Pro covers unlimited keywords across all platforms with real-time alerts.