Building Soda to monitor from data to decision

I love talking about: machine learning, data quality, decision making, post deployment data science, performance estimation, and bunch of other stuff. 

Always open to have a chat 🙂

Hakim Elakhrass

I'm the founder of Octolens, a brand monitoring tool built for developer and AI companies. With Octolens, you never miss critical conversations about your brand, competitors, or customer pain points. We surface high-signal posts so you can engage, connect, and grow.

Over 1,000 founders and growth teams use Octolens to stay close to the conversation.

Before Octolens, I was Chief of Staff at crowd.dev (acquired by the Linux Foundation), where I worked on DevTool growth and community-led strategies. I also co-founded SaveSpace (Techstars '22).

Earlier, I worked at brand consultancy Prophet, where I helped businesses refine and protect their brand identity.

At Octolens, we help teams monitor their brand online—because what people say when you're not in the room matters.

Charlotte Schmitt

"Can I talk to a supervisor?"

Sorry, I am the supervisor. Also the product team. And customer support. And growth...

At this stage, doing all the customer support means faster fixes, better product decisions, and faster learning.

But sometimes it also means disappointing customers when there's literally no one else to escalate to. 😅

Founder @ Octolens | Brand Monitoring for AI & Developer Companies

I didn’t find this by scrolling Reddit.

Octolens found it for me.

Mike Peck mentioned us in r/socialmedia and wrote: 

“Octolens is legit. Zero affiliation… just a satisfied user.”

No nudge from us or affiliate link. Seeing these types of brand mentions never gets old! 🫶

Most of the meaningful feedback and recommendations do not happen on your own channels. They happen in communities you can't constantly manually  check.

That is exactly why we built Octolens, so these moments do not go by unnoticed.

Word of mouth is the best marketing, and you want to know when it happens.

Most brand monitoring tools trap your data in dashboards.

We just launched the Octolens MCP server.

Now you can use your favorite AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT to pull in your social listening data and build the workflows you care about.

Some examples our early users are already building:
- Summarizing user feedback for product 
- Daily competitor intelligence briefings
- Creating replies to posts in their voice
- Weekly brand health reports

The setup takes no time, one CLI command and you're done.

We built this because we listened to our users who asked for more integrations and workflows!

Your brand mention data should work for you, not sit in a dashboard.

Check out my quick demo :)

As companies grow, founders stop seeing brand conversations firsthand.

Mentions increase, conversations spread across platforms, and oversight gets delegated.

For David Paffenholz 🧃, that is exactly why one habit stayed non negotiable. 

He reads his Octolens email digest every morning.

When he started using Octolens, Juicebox was a team of 3, fresh out of YC.

Today, Juicebox has raised 36 million, and scaled far beyond the early days.

More customers and more public mentions, but the need to stay close never changed.

“It’s one of the few things I make time for daily.” David says.

The digest is not high level analytics.
It is not vanity metrics.
It is a short list of the few conversations that actually require his attention.

At scale, the real challenge is not more data, it is staying close to the most important conversations.

Lessons I learned building and marketing to DevTools teams

Before Octolens, I worked on a product aimed at developers.

Octolens is used by teams beyond DevTools, but many of the lessons from that time I carried over.

Here’s what I took with me:

1. Fit into existing workflows or you lose

If a tool forces users to change how they work, adoption drops fast. 
That’s why from day one we focused on getting data out of Octolens, not locking it in. Slack and email alerts, webhooks, CSV exports. The goal was simple, make it usable inside tools people already live in.

If your product is embedded ito daily workflows, it'll get used.

(Octolens API + MCP coming soon 👀)

2. Word of mouth beats any campaign

Developers trust other developers. The same is true for other audiences.
Our strongest growth channel has been users telling other users. That only happens once the product experience is so good that people feel comfortable recommending it publicly.

You cannot growth hack your way around this. You earn it by listening closely and obesessing about your customer.

3. Be present where your users already are

For DevTools, that means places like X, Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub, niche Slack groups.

For your product, the places may differ but the rule stays the same.

If you are not actively listening and engaging in the spaces where your users talk, you are loosing out on growth opportunities and learnings.

4. Ruthlessly simplify onboarding

Developers have very little tolerance for unnecessary setup.

We optimized for one thing, getting users to value as fast as possible. Drop in a company domain, get suggested keywords, see real data immediately. No credit card input, long forms, or guessing needed. 

5. Stay away from buzzwords

Developers can smell fluff instantly.

Clear descriptions, honest limitations, real examples of how teams use your product will work better than buzzwordy positioning statements.

___

My takeaway: 
Developer marketing tends to look like good marketing because it forces clarity, honesty, and respect for the user’s time.

Those are good principles for any user and product and have helped me build and market Octolens.

A new customer messaged me last week:

"just started playing around with octolens, i love the simplicity compared to sprout social and the rest. keep things focused on whats important!"

We get asked constantly to add more dashboards, metrics, and integrations.

The tools we're compared against have spent years adding features and are analytics platforms that happen to include monitoring.

And that's great for some customers. 

But we are going a different direction.

We want Octolens to do one thing well: surface the conversations that matter to B2B SaaS teams, so they can act on them through their own workflows.

No bloated dashboards you'll never actually learn from. 

When someone complains about your product on Reddit, you know within seconds. When a customer says something nice in a podcast, you find out.

That's Octolens.

Every week there's a reasonable request that would make us a little more like everyone else. We have to keep saying no.

Flex mentions are live in Octolens

When you exceed your monthly mention limit on our Scale plan, you can now add usage-based mentions instead of upgrading your entire plan.

This matters when:
- Product launches drive unexpected volume
- Your brand simply outgrows your current limit 
- You're testing new keywords mid-month

You pay only for what you use. No more missing conversations during your busiest months.

Octolens now monitors news articles.

We track 150,000+ news sources, from TechCrunch to niche industry blogs.

This means you can stop:
- Setting multiple Google Alerts that drown you with noise
- Missing press mentions because you don't know which outlets to watch
- Manually checking if that article mentioned you

How it works: 
Track your keywords. Get notified when they appear in news coverage. 

News mentions flow into your same Octolens feed alongside Reddit, X, podcast mentions, and more. 

Along with our AI filtering to cut the noise, Slack notifications, workflow integrations.

Useful if you're trying to catch press coverage, track competitor announcements, or spot industry trends to highlight in your social content.

taplio

The Battle

Hakim Elakhrass

Charlotte Schmitt

Followers

Posts

Engagements

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Performance ScoreCharlotte Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Hakim Elakhrass

Charlotte Schmitt

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Charlotte Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreCharlotte Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance