Needle

What is Needle?

Needle is a conversation intelligence platform that searches across 12 online communities—including Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub, and Twitter—to surface customer insights and market trends. The tool aggregates discussions from these platforms via their APIs, filters results by relevance and intent, and helps users identify potential customers, track competitor mentions, and monitor keywords in real-time conversations. The platform is designed for founders, product managers, and go-to-market teams who want to conduct market research based on authentic user discussions rather than surveys or secondhand data. Common use cases include finding people actively seeking alternatives to competitors' products, validating startup ideas before building, and gathering weekly market insights across industries. Needle's search functionality allows users to query specific topics—for example, searching "alternatives to Notion" returns discussions where people are comparing tools. The platform reports a 92% success rate for customer discovery tasks and claims users save approximately 42 hours per week on research activities. The service is available through a freemium model with options to explore pricing and features on their website. Needle serves over 700 professionals and has generated thousands of insights for its user base.