Most posts about Threads tell you to post more. Post consistently. Engage authentically. Build community. None of them tell you how to find people who will actually pay you, which is the part most founders care about.
We have been running automated Threads searches across thousands of founder ideas for the last three months. The platform is a quiet little gold mine if you know what to ask for. Posting is not the lever. Searching is.
This post is what we have learned. How to find high-intent posts on Threads, what the intent language looks like, a 10-minute daily workflow you can run yourself, and the new Gorilla Threads search that runs it for you.
What is Threads user acquisition
Threads user acquisition is finding people on Meta's Threads who are publicly asking for the kind of product you sell, then reaching out before anyone else does. The format is short, the audience skews to indie builders and creators, and the search tools are less hostile than X's. For solo founders looking for their first 100 users, the signal-per-search ratio on Threads is the best of any platform we have measured.
The version most founders run is the same playbook they tried on X. Post threads, hope a creator with reach reposts you, repeat. That is content work, not acquisition. The version that works starts from search. Find the specific posts where someone is asking for a tool like yours, reply with something useful, DM once the conversation warms up.
Why Threads is the easiest platform left for founder demand signal
A few things lined up.
Some of X's most active founder cohort has moved over and brought their demand venting with them, but the algorithmic noise has not followed yet. The same "tired of Calendly" rant that would have gotten buried under sponsored content on X gets six replies on Threads. The room is quieter, and the people in it are still asking real questions.
Threads search is also weirdly generous. Posts with three likes show up the same as posts from verified accounts. On X, anything under a few hundred impressions effectively disappears from the index. On Threads, you can find the founder who posted "tired of HubSpot" two weeks ago even though only six people liked it. That changes what a search returns from "top posts about HubSpot" to "actual people about to leave HubSpot."
And almost no growth teams have built playbooks for the platform yet. Sales reps are still squarely focused on LinkedIn. Marketers are still treating Threads as a content surface, not a lead surface. The good high-intent posts sit unattended for days. That window will close, but right now it is wide open.
What people on Threads are actually asking
High-intent posts on Threads cluster into a few shapes. Knowing the shapes is most of the work.
The recommendation ask is the highest-converting one. "Anyone recommend a good X for Y." Short, first-person, with a use case attached. The asker has explicitly opened the door for the answer, and unlike LinkedIn this is rarely a recruiter asking on someone else's behalf.
The frustration vent is the second. "Tired of Calendly. What is everyone using these days." A founder broadcasting that their current stack is failing them. The implicit ask is "tell me what to switch to." Reply with one specific reason and you almost always get a follow up.
The shopping post is mid-funnel. "Alternative to Notion?" or "Anyone happy with Linear right now?" The asker is reading replies in real time and probably comparing two or three options as we speak. Speed matters here. The reply that lands in the first hour usually wins.
The last one is the build-in-public confession. Founders who post "just shipped my own X because nothing else worked" are also your customers. They built a hack because they could not find a tool. Show them yours and they will at least try it.
Everything else on Threads is content, not commerce. Filter for these four and the noise drops by about ten to one.
The 3-phrase rule for finding intent on Threads
Three phrasings give you almost all the intent signal. They map cleanly to the four shapes above.
"Anyone recommend X" is the peer-to-peer ask. Try it on Threads with any specific tool name. The top results are people in your network asking for help, not articles ranking the top ten of anything. This phrasing also rarely gets recruiter contamination, because recruiters write in third-person hiring language and never in first-person intent language.
"Tired of X" is the venting phrase. Search "tired of Calendly" or "tired of HubSpot" and you will find founders explaining exactly why they are about to switch. The competitor name is the lever here. Pick whoever the obvious incumbent is in your category and read the last 30 days.
"Alternative to X" is the explicit shopping query. The asker has already named the tool they want to replace. This is the cleanest signal Threads will give you because the person has done half the comparison work for you. All you need to do is be the answer.
Anchor your search on these three. Skip generic category keywords like "project management tool" because they pull content rather than your audience. The remaining results are mostly worth reading.
How to find your first users on Threads manually
A 10-minute daily workflow.
- Pick three queries for the day. One "anyone recommend" variant for your category, one "tired of" against your top competitor, one "alternative to" against your second competitor.
- Search each on Threads. Sort by Recent.
- Skim the first 20 posts. Skip motivational quotes, generic content posts, and engagement-bait questions. You are usually left with three to five real high-intent posts per query.
- Read the replies first. Other founders often answer the question for each other, which tells you what the asker actually wants and how far along their thinking is.
- Reply with one specific, useful observation. Not a pitch. If your product happens to be the right answer, mention it offhand at the end. DM once they respond.
This works. It also takes about 30 minutes a day for three queries, every day, if you are doing the reading carefully. Threads is faster than LinkedIn because posts are short and the asker is usually still online for the next hour. Reply within four hours of the post and your hit rate roughly doubles.
If you want to scale to 30 queries across product variants, competitors, and adjacent categories, manual stops being viable. That is the point where most founders stall out and conclude Threads "did not work" when really they just stopped doing the work.
How to do Threads user acquisition at scale
Two options, neither of them great if you want both quality and speed.
Hiring someone is the obvious path, except the market for Threads-specific lead gen is barely formed. Most agencies are LinkedIn or X shops that added Threads as an afterthought and run the same generic queries everyone else runs. Skip unless you find a specialist who can show you their query playbook.
The other path is a search-first tool. Most lead gen tools (Apollo, Sales Navigator, Lemlist) are built for cold outbound, not for surfacing public posts where someone is asking out loud. They give you contact lists, which is a different problem from finding intent.
Gorilla is the tool we built for this. You paste your product idea, and it runs the three-phrase rule above across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Bluesky. The output is a single ranked list of public posts where someone has, in the last 60 days, asked for a tool like yours. Direct links, intent scores, and an outreach angle for each one.
The new Threads search in Gorilla
We just shipped this. A few specifics worth knowing.
It runs across hundreds of Threads posts per search through Meta's Threads search index via Apify, then drops anything older than 60 days. The queries are generated automatically from your product description. You paste a one-line idea, and Gorilla picks the right competitors, pain points, and category terms and shapes them into the three phrasings above. You do not write a single search query yourself.
Threads results land in the same ranked feed as Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Bluesky. Each post gets an intent score, the post text, the author handle, and a direct link. Export to CSV when you are ready to reach out, or use the built-in draft helper to write a Threads reply.
It is included in every paid Gorilla search across all five sources: Reddit, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Gorilla is free to start, 100 credits, no card. Then a flat $14.99/mo for 2,000 credits, one credit per qualified lead. Low-relevance results are free.
Threads vs other platforms for finding customers
Threads against X is the easy one. Threads has fewer crawlers, fewer bots, and a more permissive search index. X has more raw volume but the intent signal is worse now. If your audience left X, they are probably on Threads. Run both if you can.
Threads against LinkedIn comes down to who your customer is. LinkedIn is better for B2B with multi-person buying committees and longer sales cycles. Threads is better for solo founders, creators, and prosumer software audiences. If your customer is a founder choosing for themselves, Threads outperforms LinkedIn by a wide margin.
Threads against Reddit is a different shape entirely. Reddit is still the deepest platform for niche communities and long-form demand venting. Threads gives you the post you can reply to today. Reddit tells you what people have been complaining about for the last six months. Use both for different jobs.
Threads against TikTok is not really a comparison. TikTok is for finding creators who review tools in your space and partnering with them. Threads is for direct text-based intent. They are different acquisition channels that happen to share an audience.
The honest answer is that most founders should run all five. The marginal cost of adding Threads to a Gorilla search is zero, and the lift is usually 15 to 30 percent of the total high-intent posts a run surfaces.
Frequently asked questions
Is Threads good for user acquisition?
For finding individuals and small teams who are asking publicly, yes. It is currently underused by growth teams, which makes it the highest leverage of the major social platforms for solo founders. The window will not stay open forever. If you are reading this in 2026, you are early.
How do you find leads on Threads?
Use the 3-phrase rule. Search "anyone recommend X" for your category, "tired of X" against your top competitor, and "alternative to X" against the second one. Filter for posts under 14 days old. Read the replies before you reply. DM after you have had a real exchange in public.
Does Threads work for B2B?
For small-team B2B with founder audiences, yes. For enterprise B2B with procurement committees, no. The Threads audience is indie builders, solo founders, prosumer software audiences, and creators running businesses. If that overlaps with your customer profile, run Threads searches. If your customer is a Director of Procurement at a Fortune 500, run LinkedIn instead.
How is Threads different from X for finding customers?
The audience leans more builder, since a chunk of X's founder cohort moved over. The search index is more generous to low-engagement posts, so you can find venting that did not go viral. And the platform has not been worked over by growth teams yet, so the high-intent posts mostly sit unattended.
Can you find your first 100 users on Threads?
If your product is for solo founders, indie builders, creators, or prosumer software audiences: comfortably yes. Run the 3-phrase rule for two weeks across your top three competitors and you will find 30 to 50 actionable high-intent posts. Convert 10 to 20 percent into conversations and you are at your first 100 users inside a month or two. If your audience is enterprise, start on LinkedIn.
What tools work for Threads lead generation?
Most lead gen tools have not built Threads support yet. The category right now is Gorilla, a couple of social listening tools (Sprout, Brandwatch) that crawl Threads but are not optimized for intent search, and manual workflows. If you want it automated with intent scoring, Gorilla is the option that ships today.
Paste your product idea into Gorilla and get a ranked list of high-intent posts from Reddit, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and YouTube in under two minutes. Free to start, then $14.99/mo for 2,000 credits.