# I built a Claude Code skill that finds customers, not competitors, on Reddit & LinkedIn

> Source: <https://dev.to/newan2001/i-built-a-claude-code-skill-that-finds-customers-not-competitors-on-reddit-linkedin-4h82>
> Published: 2026-06-19 08:06:23+00:00

`I do consulting. Like most people who sell a service, I know I *should* be active on Reddit and LinkedIn — finding people with the problem I solve and being genuinely helpful. I never do it consistently, because the manual loop is miserable: search, scroll, judge relevance, figure out what to even say, repeat.

So I tried to automate the boring parts with a Claude Code skill. And the first version taught me something that reframed the whole thing.

My first runs surfaced ~10 posts that all *matched my topic* — and were almost entirely **other consultants posting sales content.** Competitors. Not a single actual buyer.

It took me a minute to see why, and it's obvious in hindsight: **keyword search returns whatever is published about a topic, and what's published is supply-side.** Search "leadership consulting" and you get people

Completely different words. So the fix wasn't better ranking — it was **searching the pain your buyer voices, not the category you sell.**

[ delta-engage](https://github.com/newan2001/delta-engage) is an open-source Claude Code skill. Twice a week it:

`buyer`

/ `peer_competitor`

/ `kol`

/ `noise`

— so a competitor's sales post never shows up as a leadThe one rule it never breaks: **you write the final comment and post it manually from your own account.** It prepares; you act.

``plaintext`

🎯 Engagement digest — Thu 18 Jun 2026 · 2 to engage · 1 partnership

ENGAGE (your ICP)

Comment (edit before posting):

The fix that worked for us wasn't a new tool — it was deleting the ~40% of

alerts that never led to action, then routing the rest by severity. What's

your noisiest alert source right now, and does anyone own tuning it?

⚠️ Safety: r/ExperiencedDevs — no tools/links; keep it experience-led, personalize before posting.

🤝 PEERS & PARTNERSHIPS (relationship plays — engage, don't pitch)

**Logistics in scripts, judgment in prompts.** The deterministic, fragile stuff — scraping, dedup, the ranking math, recurrence tallying — lives in Python that runs *without* loading into the model's context. The judgment — refining the ICP, classifying intent, drafting the comment — is left to Claude. Keeping those separate made the whole thing both cheaper and more reliable.

**Cookieless by rule.** LinkedIn discovery uses only logged-out/public actors — it never touches your session, so there's zero account-ban risk. The adapter literally refuses any input carrying a session cookie. (You engage manually anyway, so the skill never needs your login.)

**Reddit-safe drafting.** Reddit's spam filters punish link-dropping, copy-paste comments, and — increasingly — AI-sounding text. So the skill bakes in the current anti-shadowban practices (the 9:1 rule, per-subreddit norms, new-account ramps) and treats "personalize the draft before posting" as a *safety* requirement, not just etiquette.

**BYOK.** It runs on your own [Apify](https://apify.com) token. No shared keys, no lock-in, no licensing chokepoint — a lesson the whole "Proxycurl shut down and stranded everyone" saga taught the space.

One paste into Claude Code — it clones the skill and runs setup:

`bash`

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/newan2001/delta-engage.git ~/.claude/skills/delta-engage && cd ~/.claude/skills/delta-engage && ./setup

Then run `/delta-engage`

. The first run reads your site/docs to draft your ICP (you confirm it), does a live digest so you see it work, and offers to set a Mon/Thu routine that delivers to Slack, Notion, or just in-app.

It's MIT-licensed and on GitHub: [github.com/newan2001/delta-engage](https://github.com/newan2001/delta-engage)

If you try it, I'd genuinely love feedback — especially on the intent classification, since that's where the "customers not competitors" magic either works or doesn't. Issues and PRs welcome.`