Find Every Conversation About Your Dev Tool
3 ways to track mentions across Hacker News, X, GitHub Issues, DEV.to, podcasts, newsletters and more
You should know what users say about you (and your competitors). But how?
Enterprise tools like Sprout Social completely miss where developers actually hang out - Hacker News, tech newsletters, podcast transcripts. That's where trends start.
Spoiler: Octolens is my favorite and I’ll tell you why.
1) Val Town (~free)
At Snap, I built an app using Val Town and SocialData (Twitter API proxy) to track mentions for teammates who didn't use Twitter. Twitter's official API costs ~$200/month, hence the proxy.
Then, Twitter banned SocialData, which killed that workflow.
But Val Town still has templates for:
Val Town is limited by platform APIs (Twitter and LinkedIn are a pain) but it’s otherwise free and effective.
2) Octolens ($99/month)
I found out about Octolens through our friends at PostHog. Now it’s part of my daily workflow.
The dashboard is clean, but I rarely touch it. All mentions flows directly to Discord / Slack, where I see it and can triage.
What Octolens catches that others miss:
DEV.to articles
Stack Overflow questions
Tech newsletters and podcast transcripts
and more (including all traditional social platforms)
I keep our #mentions channel public in Discord:
At $99/month for Discord webhook access ($69 for Slack). It’s worth every penny. PostHog uses it. Vercel uses it.
3) GPT-5 (free but spotty)
You can prompt ChatGPT:
Search for recent mentions of [your product] in docs, READMEs, blog posts, and changelogs. Exclude anything from our own domains or repos.
This is how I found Adobe linking to our product in their docs (!!)
You can run it manually or set a recurring alert. It’s spotty, but it searches the entire web while Octolens only monitors specific platforms. Together, they catch 99% of mentions that matter.
Why this matters
Social listening shapes my roadmap, surfaces testimonials, and catch conversations we’d otherwise miss.
When someone posts a problem I can solve, I jump in to help - that’s led to new customers, partners, and collaborations.
Your users trust Reddit more than your landing page. Meet them where they are.