I open-sourced ReacherX for a few reasons. Building alone gets lonely. The problem turned out to be much bigger than I expected. And I wanted people to be able to change the product for their own needs.
But the first one is more personal than the others.
I've always wanted friends I could build cool things with. People who are excited about the things I'm excited about. In my real life, I haven't found many of them.
When you're building alone, there's no one to keep you in check or guide you. You can spend weeks going down the wrong path without realizing it. I know because I've done that with ReacherX.
By opening the code, I hoped to connect with people who care about the same problem. I want to talk, exchange ideas, ask questions, answer questions, and learn from other people. I don't want this to stay a project that only exists inside my head and on my computer.
If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, I'd love to hear from you. You don't have to arrive with a pull request.
I started ReacherX in mid-2023. At the time, I just wanted a tool to help me get more followers on X/Twitter. The idea was to reply to popular accounts as soon as they posted, so more people would see my replies.
In about a month, I released v1 beta. It was scrappy, and I got a lot of negative feedback. People thought I was building a spam tool. I was surprised and a bit upset, but looking back, that reaction was expected. I hadn't communicated the purpose properly. I also felt that something wasn't right with the idea.
One night, while sitting on the toilet and thinking about it, another idea came to me. Instead of replying to random popular posts, why not find posts that are relevant to what I'm offering? Why not help someone meet the people who actually need what they're making?
With an ad, I don't get to see all the people it was shown to. With this idea, I could see the person in front of me, read what they were saying, and decide whether I could help.
I changed direction and released v2 a month or two later. This time people understood what I was trying to do. But the tool was still pretty bad. You couldn't use it reliably every day. Getting it to find the right people was the biggest problem.
I then made a prototype to check whether people would pay if I could fix the accuracy and other issues. A few people bought it. I refunded everyone and explained that it was a prototype, and that I was working on the real product.
When I started the project, I was studying for my bachelor's degree in computer science (BSCS) at university. I also had a part-time job and was freelancing on Upwork as a designer and developer. ReacherX was something I worked on alongside all of that.
I wanted to go full time, but each time I ran low on cash, I had to do something to make money. Then I would continue working on the project on the side. That's the main reason progress has taken so long. Three years since starting the project doesn't mean I've had three years to work on it full time.
In June 2026, I left my last company and went full time on ReacherX. I want to keep it that way. I've opened a Patreon page because having enough money to keep working on it is still something I have to figure out.
V3 took more than a year to release. During that time, a lot changed in AI. Agents started appearing, along with tools and libraries for building them.
Alongside the problem of finding time for it, I made a mistake with the product itself. I got disconnected from what was happening in AI and kept working on the version I'd already designed. When I finally released it, it was missing something people had started to expect: the tool doing work for them.
That made me realize what I needed to do with v4. I wanted someone to tell ReacherX who they needed and get help finding those people, learning about them, and reaching out. I shared v4 beta on June 29, 2026.
It isn't perfect. I've been working on this for three years, and I still have a lot to figure out.
The idea sounds simple: tell a tool who you need, and it finds them. But a person hiring an engineer needs something different from a founder looking for investors. Both are different from someone trying to grow a community.
I don't think I can cover all those needs on my own. I want to build something people can use, change, and build on. If someone adapts ReacherX for a problem they understand better than I do, other people with that same problem could benefit from their work.
As a developer, I've benefited from open source my whole career. shadcn/ui, a widely used open-source React UI library, is one example that really stood out to me. It gave people code they could take and change, and a whole community has grown around that.
I'd like something similar to happen here. So many tools for finding and reaching people are closed, and many assume you already know sales terminology and how to set up a sales process.
I don't. I'm a developer and designer trying to solve a problem I have myself. I want a normal person to be able to use ReacherX without learning a new profession first.
I thought about that when I was starting out. But if a product works and starts getting attention, other people will try to build something similar anyway. Keeping the source closed doesn't stop that.
For me, sharing it makes more sense. I want people to use the code and contribute ideas. I want company while I work on a problem I've already spent years on.
