SwitchSignal

Find public competitor switching-intent signals and turn them into sales-ready contact candidates.

SwitchSignal helps sales and growth teams find public discussions where people appear to be unhappy with a competitor, considering alternatives, discussing migration, or showing signs of switching intent.

It is designed for sales users, founders, SDRs, growth teams and consultants who want a simple way to spot competitor-displacement opportunities without manually searching public communities.

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What SwitchSignal does

You enter a competitor name, choose a public source, and run the Actor.

SwitchSignal then:

1. Searches supported public sources.
2. Filters out obvious noise, vendor promotion and ordinary word matches.
3. Scores commercial intent.
4. Classifies the lead type.
5. Generates recommended next action.
6. Returns contact candidates and company clues where public evidence exists.
7. Writes clean results to the Apify Dataset.

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Typical use cases

• Find public posts where people are looking for alternatives to a competitor.
• Monitor pricing pain around a competitor.
• Spot migration or replacement discussions.
• Discover competitor-displacement opportunities.
• Build a weekly list of public contact candidates to manually research.

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Important: what counts as a lead?

SwitchSignal is strict by design.

It should qualify buyer-side signals such as:

• “We are looking for an Intercom alternative.”
• “We are moving away from Heroku because the bill is too high.”
• “Support has been painful and we need to replace Zendesk.”

It should reject non-buyer signals such as:

• “I built an Intercom alternative.”
• “Our product is an alternative to Monday.”
• “Monday” used as a day of the week.
• “The notion of privacy” where Notion is only an ordinary English word.
• A company name appearing in a list of layoffs or news items.
• “We considered replacing HubSpot, but HubSpot will be kept.”

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Current supported sources

Source	Status	Notes
Hacker News	Supported	Best current automated source for SaaS, developer tools and infrastructure discussions.
Public URLs	Supported	Paste a public URL and optional snippet for scoring and AI enrichment.
Reddit user-provided URLs/text	Supported fallback	Full automated Reddit discovery may require approved Reddit API access.
Reddit search-index snippets	Supported fallback	Score externally supplied Reddit URLs, titles and snippets.
LinkedIn	Not native in v1	Can be considered later through approved APIs, imports or external Apify sources.
X, G2, Capterra, Trustpilot	Not native in v1	Candidate future sources through approved or licensed access.

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Simple setup

1. Enter the competitor

Example:

Intercom

2. Add aliases

Example:

Intercom
intercom.com
Intercom support

3. Describe your product

Example:

A simpler customer support platform for SaaS teams.

4. Choose a source

Start with:

Hacker News

5. Choose result limit and threshold

Recommended beta settings:

Maximum results: 10
Minimum intent score: 60
AI enrichment: off for quality testing, on for better summaries and openers

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Output fields explained in plain English

Field	Meaning
intentScore	How strong the switching-intent signal is, from 0 to 100.
leadType	Whether the record looks like buyer intent, vendor promotion, noise, etc.
commercialIntent	Business relevance: none, low, medium, high or very high.
salesReadiness	What to do next: ignore, monitor, research company, or reach out now.
priorityTier	Critical, high, medium or low.
qualificationReason	Why SwitchSignal qualified or rejected the signal.
sourceUrl	Link to the original public discussion.
authorHandle	Public handle, for example Hacker News username.
companyCandidate	Possible company clue, not a verified company.
companyConfidence	Confidence in the company clue.
suggestedOpener	A suggested first line for outreach, human review required.

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Key outputs

SwitchSignal writes qualified signals to the default Dataset.

It also writes these summaries to the default Key-value Store:

Record	What it means
RUN_SUMMARY	Overall counts, filters, qualified signals and warnings.
SOURCE_DIAGNOSTICS	Source-level status and warnings.
AI_ENRICHMENT_SUMMARY	AI usage summary, success, failure and skipped counts.
CONTACT_SUMMARY	Deduplicated public contact candidates and company clues.

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Contact candidates are not verified contacts

SwitchSignal does not provide verified emails, phone numbers or guaranteed company identification in v1.

It returns public contact candidates and company clues.

Always review before outreach.

Company clues can be:

• profile-domain evidence,
• source-domain evidence,
• public author handle evidence,
• or unknown.

Low-confidence company clues should be manually checked before contacting anyone.

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AI enrichment

AI enrichment is optional.

When enabled, SwitchSignal can improve:

• summary,
• evidence,
• suggested opener,
• intent interpretation.

You can either:

• use the Actor owner’s configured OpenAI key where available, or
• provide your own OpenAI Platform key in the secret input field.

If AI is not available, SwitchSignal still works in rules-only mode.

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Scheduling and email notifications

SwitchSignal can be run on a schedule using Apify schedules.

Email notifications are not built directly into SwitchSignal v1, but can be set up using Apify webhooks and an automation tool such as Make, Zapier, n8n, SendGrid or Gmail automation.

Simple flow:

Apify Schedule
→ Run SwitchSignal daily or weekly
→ Apify Webhook after successful run
→ Automation checks whether qualifiedSignals > 0
→ Send email digest

See:

• docs/scheduled-monitoring.md
• docs/email-notifications.md

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Recommended beta settings

For first-time users:

Source: Hacker News
Time window: last 30 days
Maximum results: 10
Minimum intent score: 60
AI enrichment: off for quality testing, on for polished summaries

For a simple deterministic test:

Source: Public URLs
AI enrichment: off
Use supplied snippet

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Pricing note

SwitchSignal is priced per qualified signal, not per raw crawled page.

A qualified signal means SwitchSignal believes the record passed its buyer-intent quality gates and was written to the Dataset.

During beta, users should manually review results before acting on them.

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Limitations

SwitchSignal is a paid beta product.

Current limitations:

• It may return zero results for some competitors or sources.
• It may miss relevant signals that do not use explicit switching language.
• Company clues are not guaranteed.
• Reddit full discovery may require approved API access.
• LinkedIn is not a native v1 source.
• AI-generated openers should be reviewed before use.

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Responsible use

Use SwitchSignal for respectful, human-reviewed sales research.

Do not use it for spam, harassment, automated mass messaging, scraping private communities or bypassing platform rules.

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Quick beta test question

After running SwitchSignal, ask yourself:

Would I trust this result enough to research or contact this person?

If the answer is no, record the reason and use it as feedback.