Most founders who build a competitor to an existing tool do it because they couldn't afford the original. That wasn't my situation. I was paying for Mention.com, using it every day, and it was mostly fine. The problem was everything it couldn't do that I kept pretending didn't matter.
The Honest Version of How This Started
I was running outbound research for a B2B SaaS client in 2022. The job was simple in theory: find companies and buyers who were already expressing pain, already talking about the problem our client solved, and surface them before a competitor did. Mention.com was my starting point. It tracked brand keywords, flagged news articles, caught some social posts. It did what it said on the box.
But "what it said on the box" turned out to be the wrong box. What I actually needed wasn't brand monitoring. It was signal extraction. There's a meaningful difference. Brand monitoring tells you when someone says your name. Signal extraction tells you when someone is about to need you, even if they've never heard of you. Mention.com was built for the first thing. Nobody I could find had built cleanly for the second.
So I started stitching together workarounds. A keyword tracker here, a scraper there, a prompt chain I rebuilt every few weeks when the underlying data changed. It worked until it didn't, and when it didn't it usually failed at the worst possible moment - during a pitch, or when a client asked for proof that the leads were actually qualified. That's when I stopped telling myself I was just using a combination of tools and admitted I was maintaining a fragile system that I'd invented because nothing better existed.
