Find people who need your side project with the DEV API, in about 20 lines of Python

I'm a solo founder looking for my first users, and a lot of the people I want to talk to write on DEV. "I launched and nobody came." "0 sales after 3 weeks." Those posts are a good place to start a conversation, because the person just described their problem in public.
Here's the script I run to find them. It only uses the public DEV API, so you don't need a key.

import json, urllib.request from datetime import datetime, timedelta, timezone TAGS = ["buildinpublic", "sideprojects", "saas", "startup"] WORDS = ["first users", "first customers", "no users", "0 users", "0 sales", "zero sales", "nobody", "how do you find"] SINCE = datetime.now(timezone.utc) - timedelta(days=7) def get(url): req = urllib.request.Request(url, headers={"User-Agent": "first-users-finder"}) with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=30) as r: return json.load(r) seen = set() for tag in TAGS: for a in get(f"https://dev.to/api/articles/latest?tag={tag}&per_page=100"): published = datetime.fromisoformat(a["published_at"].replace("Z", "+00:00")) text = (a["title"] + " " + (a["description"] or "")).lower() if a["id"] in seen or published < SINCE or not any(w in text for w in WORDS): continue seen.add(a["id"]) print(f'{a["published_at"][:10]} {a["comments_count"]:>2} comments {a["title"]}\n {a["url"]}') 

It pulls the latest articles for four tags, keeps the last 7 days, and keeps the ones whose title or description contains one of the phrases. Then it prints the date, the number of comments, the title and the link.
Change WORDS to fit what you sell. If you built an invoicing tool, try "late payment" or "chasing invoices" instead of "0 sales". When I ran it today, most of the matches had 0 comments, so a reply there doesn't get lost.
Now the honest part. Over the last week I left 29 comments on DEV posts like these. 2 people answered. On Indie Hackers, the same kind of reply got 9 answers out of 16. My read is that most DEV posts are finished articles, not questions, so the author isn't expecting a conversation. If you use the script, favour posts that end with a question, and keep your comment about their post: one specific detail, one easy question, no link.
I'm building FounderPulse, which runs this kind of search across more sites than DEV. But the script above is enough to start, and it's free.