Your first match

This walk takes about ten minutes. At the end, a monitor is running and collecting conversations for you.

1. Describe your business

Open Projects and press New project. Answer three questions in your customers' words, not in marketing language:

• What is the product? For example: A task tracker for small teams.
• Who is it for? For example: Team leads at growing companies.
• What problem does it solve? For example: Tasks get lost across chat, email, and spreadsheets.

Have a website or a document about your product? Open Start from a website or document, and SignalScout drafts the answers for you. Read them before you save.

A project holds these answers once, so every new monitor starts with them. Projects says more.

2. Create a monitor

A monitor is one search that keeps running. On the project, press New monitor. Setup has five steps, and nothing starts collecting until you finish:

1. Product. The answers from your project, already filled in.
2. Signals. Which kinds of conversation matter: somebody asking for recommendations, looking for alternatives, complaining about their current solution, and more.
3. Sources. Which platforms to watch. A platform needs a connected account first.
4. Search plan. SignalScout writes the searches for each platform. Edit any phrase, delete the weak ones, add your own.
5. Schedule & budget. How often to look, and the most it may spend in a month.

On SignalScout Cloud

A project and its monitor are made together, in four steps: there is no schedule or budget step, because your plan sets both. SignalScout Cloud says more.

3. Test the plan, then start

On the last step, press Test this plan. SignalScout runs each search once, against a small sample, and shows:

• how often each search finds a post;
• what a month would cost at your schedule;
• what the test itself cost.

A search that costs a lot and finds little is the one to delete. When the numbers look right, press Start monitor.

4. Read your inbox

The first posts arrive on the monitor's schedule. Open Inbox. Each match shows the post, its score, and the reasons the model gave.

Nothing yet after the first run? That is normal for a narrow search. Open the monitor to see what it collected and what the filters kept back.

5. Say which leads were good

Under each match, Was this a good lead? Press Good lead or Not relevant. A match you mark Not relevant leaves the inbox. Your verdicts are kept, and they show how often the score was right for your business. The inbox explains each part of a match.