There's a specific feeling I stopped having, and I only noticed when it was gone: the 9pm dread of I haven't done my Reddit replies today.

If you've tried founder-led GTM — replying to threads where people ask for what you build — you know the failure curve. Week one is exhilarating: every thread is a potential customer, every reply gets an upvote, you're sure this is the channel. Week two, finding good threads starts feeling like a second job. Week three, you're five tabs deep at 11pm with ChatGPT open in tab six, and some part of you has already decided to skip tomorrow.

The channel didn't stop working. The workflow was never sustainable. Almost everyone who quits founder-led GTM quits the logistics, not the strategy.

Here's the version I run now. It takes about fifteen minutes, it happens once a day with coffee, and — this is the part I care about — it has survived contact with months of me, a person with the discipline of a golden retriever.

The routine

7:50am — the email finds me. I don't "remember to check the tool." A morning email shows up with today's queue: the threads that crossed my relevance bar overnight, each with a draft already written. The pull-vs-push distinction sounds small. It's the entire difference between a habit and a chore. Chores require remembering. My calendar remembers nothing before coffee.

7:52 — triage, top to bottom. The queue is already sorted by score — buying intent, fit against my actual product, author quality, freshness. I'm not deciding what to look at; I'm deciding yes or no on each item, top down. Most days there are four to eight items. I kill the bottom half without guilt. Guilt-free killing is a feature: if everything feels obligatory, the queue is mis-tuned, and tomorrow-me starts avoiding it.

7:55 — edit the survivors. Each surviving thread has a draft in my voice — grounded in what my product actually does today, because the system re-reads my own docs and changelog on a schedule. I edit every single one. Sometimes two words, sometimes half the draft. This step is not overhead to minimize; it's where my judgment, my tone on this particular morning, and my honesty enter the reply. The draft's job is to delete the blank page, not to delete me.

8:02 — send, from my own browser. One pass: the extension opens each thread with the reply pre-filled, I read it once in context — replies that looked right in a queue sometimes look wrong under the actual OP — and I hit submit. Me, my account, my logged-in browser. Nothing automated touches the send, which is why I'll still have this account in five years.

8:05 — done. Genuinely done. Not "done unless I think of something" — done the way the dishes are done. The dread is gone because the loop is closed.

Why the design choices matter more than the tool

You can build a manual version of this with a spreadsheet, a saved-search bookmark folder, and a calendar block. If you do, steal the design constraints, because they're what make it survive:

Batch, don't stream. Checking mentions as they arrive is how a 15-minute task becomes ambient anxiety smeared across a whole day. One batch, one sitting. The threads from 2am are still fresh enough at 8am — thread half-life is hours, not minutes, and reply quality beats reply speed every time I've measured it.

Pre-rank, never browse. The moment the workflow includes "scroll and see what's interesting," you've lost — browsing expands to fill all available time and then takes the evening too. Whatever does the ranking (a rubric, a tool, a VA), the founder should only ever see a short ordered list.

Cap it. My queue auto-engages a maximum number of threads per day, on purpose. An unbounded queue trains you to dread opening it. A capped queue is a finishable task, and finishable tasks are the only ones that happen daily for months.

Keep the human at the send. Partly TOS safety — automated posting is what gets accounts banned. Mostly quality: the 90 seconds of review per reply is the cheapest quality-control any marketing channel will ever offer you.

The compounding part

Here's what surprised me after a couple of months of the routine: the fifteen minutes get more valuable, not less. Every send feeds back — which communities produce replies that turn into signups, which phrasings convert, which authors respond. The queue's ranking gets sharper about my buyers every week. Month three's fifteen minutes are worth multiples of month one's, with identical effort.

That's the quiet argument for making the loop small and daily instead of heroic and occasional: compounding only works on things you actually repeat.

The internet does not need you all day. It needs you for fifteen minutes, in the right threads, sounding like yourself. Go have your evenings back.