Your ears are burning—listen in with Octolens and Val Town

Apparently SaaS is dead, and on paper we should probably be broadcasting that narrative ("roll your own SaaS on Val Town!") until the cows come home. But sometimes, paying for a does-one-thing-well tool like Octolens makes more sense. Val Town complements such tools rather than replacing them.

Octolens is a "social listening" tool for tracking mentions of your company across the web: LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. Basically, you get notified when anyone on the internet types out your company keyword(s), whether an excited superfan on Reddit or a LinkedIn thought leader or a cold Hacker News commenter.

Hand rolled mentions

Before using Octolens at Val Town, we relied on hand-rolled social listening vals for each platform. One for Twitter, Hacker News, GitHub, Reddit, Bluesky, and on and on.

That works ok, especially if you only really care about one or two social platforms, and you can remix those vals to build your own specialized listening. But it wasn't trivial to capture all mentions and keep up with maintenance. Keeping up with changes to Twitter's API, for example, was classic Whac-A-Mole: their API became very expensive, so we paid for it and became a sort of proxy reseller to customers, then when they stopped supporting that we used started using scrapers, which of course Twitter blocked next.

We switched to Octolens, plus our own custom val, and it has been a useful set-it-and-forget-it tool for us.

Octolens webhooks

Octolens as a standalone product has email and Slack alerts for your mentions. And for doing something bespoke, they have webhooks. Nowadays we have an Octolens alert set up that sends a webhook for every Val Town mention to our octolens val, which forwards to Discord.

Our configured Octolens webhook URL contains a query string like ?secret=your_secret_here stored in Val Town as an environment variable so that we know requests to the val are actually from Octolens.

You can remix that val if Discord is where you want to see mentions, or you can do something else: enrich customer leads via Clay or RB2B, add them to your CRM, create a custom testimonial wall, or store in PostHog. Social listening can be for finding customer leads, shining a light on dark bug reports, or just pure vanity.

To get started, sign up at octolens.com and follow our docs guide.