Leadguru is a community lead generation platform that monitors Slack workspaces, Discord servers, and Telegram groups for buying-intent conversations and surfaces them in a unified workspace. Setting up your account takes three steps: connect a Slack, Discord, or Telegram account, create a keyword monitoring rule, and run Deep Research on your communities to find historical intent messages. The whole flow is designed to put your first leads in front of you on day one — not after a month of real-time monitoring.
This playbook walks through the exact sequence we recommend to every new user, from a fresh signup to a populated pipeline of warm leads. If you’ve already been added to a few private communities, you’ll move faster. If you haven’t, we include a curated resource list for finding Slack, Discord, and Telegram groups worth joining.
Step 1: Connect a Slack, Discord, or Telegram Account
Open Leadguru and connect at least one account from a platform where you already participate in (or want to participate in) private communities. Leadguru supports multiple accounts on every platform — there is no limit on how many Slack workspaces, Discord servers, or Telegram accounts you can connect, so you can mirror your real presence or add accounts for team members.
To connect Slack: Click “Add account” in Connections → Add Account → Slack. Once connected, Leadguru can read messages from any channel you have access to in the workspaces you’ve authorized.
To connect Discord: Connections → Add Account → Discord.
Step 1: Open Discord in your browser
Go to https://discord.com and log in.
Step 2: Open Developer Tools
Option 1:
On Windows: Press Ctrl + Shift + I
On Mac: Press ⌥ + ⌘ + I
Option 2 (no shortcuts):
Click the three dots ⋮ in the top-right corner of your browser (Chrome).
Navigate to More tools → Developer tools
Step 3: Go to the “Network” tab
Reload the page (press F5) while keeping the Developer Tools open.
Look for a request called science, messages, or experiments.
Step 4: Click on the request and then go to the “Headers” section
Step 5: Scroll down to “authorization” header
You’ll find a long string like mFaXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX… – this is your Discord token.
Step 6: Copy your token and paste it into the required field inside our app (if prompted).
To connect Telegram: Connections → Add Account → Telegram. Sign in with your phone number via the official Telegram API (we never store your password) or just scan the Qr code. Once connected, Leadguru can read messages from any group or channel you’ve joined.
You don’t have a community presence yet? Most B2B teams join private Slack, Discord, or Telegram groups over time through industry contacts, conferences, or referrals. If you’re starting from zero, here are curated resources to find communities worth joining:
Where to Find Slack Communities
- Slofile — the most popular public database of Slack communities, filterable by category (Tech, Startup, Marketing) and language.
- r/Slack: How to find Slack communities — community-recommended resource thread.
- r/remotework list of Slack communities for remote work — vetted list of active remote-work groups.
- GitHub — many open-source projects (Supabase, Docker, Kubernetes, and others) have official Slack or Discord channels for support.
- OnlineGeniuses: 14 ways to find open Slack communities — roundup of directories and Google-dorking techniques.
- DataTalks.Club Slack communities list — curated data and tech community list.
- Airtable Universe: The full list of Slack communities — community-curated Airtable base.
- Brian Fink: Finding your community on Slack — Medium walkthrough on discovering niche Slack groups.
- GitHub: thisdot/tech-community-slacks — open-source repository of tech community Slacks.
For Discord communities: Discord has a built-in “Discover” server directory — open Discord, click the compass icon in the left sidebar, and search by interest, topic, or game. For B2B niches, search keywords like “startup,” “founders,” “developers,” or your industry vertical. Many niche professional Discords require a quick application or verification before granting access.
Where to Find Telegram Communities
- TGStat — the most comprehensive Telegram channels and groups catalog, with engagement stats and category filters.
- Reddit — search topic-specific subreddits (e.g., r/TelegramGroups, r/CryptoCurrency, r/Startup) for posts where users drop group invite links.
- Social media search — search keywords like “Telegram [topic]” on X (Twitter), Facebook Groups, or even within Discord. Many Telegram groups are promoted on these platforms with public invite links.
Pro tip: Don’t try to join 100 communities at once. Start with 10–15 that are highly relevant to your ICP, monitor them for a week to see what kind of conversations are happening, and expand from there. Quality of community beats quantity — an active group of 500 founders generates more leads than an inactive group of 50,000.
Step 2: Create Your First Keyword Monitoring Rule (Free)
Once your account is connected, go to Monitoring Rules and create your first rule. We recommend starting with a Keyword Monitoring Rule because it costs nothing to run on Leadguru — keyword filtering doesn’t use AI credits, so you can run as many keyword rules as you want across all your connected communities at no extra cost.
Leadguru’s monitoring rules come in three flavors, in increasing complexity:
- Keyword Detection — exact keyword combinations, free, fast, no AI credits used. Best for high-volume scanning when you know the phrases your leads use.
- AI Prompts — natural-language descriptions evaluated by AI. Best for nuanced intent detection and context understanding.
- Mixed Rules — keywords as a first filter, then AI to evaluate intent on the filtered set. Best for balancing accuracy and cost.
Start with keywords. Once you’re seeing consistent results, graduate to AI prompts or mixed rules.
How to Build Your Keyword List
The fastest way to generate a strong keyword list is to ask an AI assistant that knows your business. Open ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI agent familiar with your product, your ICP, and the problems you solve. Tell it:
“I’m using Leadguru to monitor private Slack, Discord, and Telegram communities for buying-intent conversations. Help me build a keyword list for keyword monitoring rules. My product is [describe your product in 1–2 sentences]. My ideal customer is [describe your ICP]. The kinds of problems they post about include [list 3–5 pain points]. The kinds of requests they post include [list 3–5 buying signals]. The kinds of competitor mentions they post include [list 3–5 competitor names]. Generate a comprehensive keyword list separated by semicolons so I can paste it into Leadguru’s keyword rule field.”
The AI will return a list like:
looking for CRM; need a CRM; recommend CRM; alternatives to [your competitor]; anyone use [your category]; struggling with [pain point]; help with [pain point]; best tool for [use case]; [competitor] alternative; switching from [competitor]; evaluating [category] tools; budget for [category]; hiring for [your service]
Copy the semicolon-separated list and paste it into Leadguru’s Keyword Monitoring Rule field. Each phrase becomes an independent match — Leadguru will flag any message containing one or more of those phrases.
Pro tip: Include both your competitor names and phrases like “alternatives to [competitor]” or “switching from [competitor].” Buyers explicitly comparing tools or describing churn are the warmest leads in any community.
Apply the Rule Across Your Communities
When saving the rule, choose which connected accounts and which specific channels it should monitor. For your first rule, we recommend selecting all channels across all connected accounts — you can narrow down later once you see where the leads are coming from. The more surface area you give the rule at the start, the faster you’ll learn which communities produce the most relevant conversations.
Once the rule is active, Leadguru starts monitoring in real time. Matched messages will appear in your Opportunities feed as they arrive.
Step 3: Don’t Wait — Run Deep Research for Historical Leads
This is the most important step for new users, and the one most people skip.
Real-time monitoring only catches messages from the moment you turn it on. If you’ve just joined a Slack community that has been active for two years, you’ve missed two years of “looking for X” messages. Deep Research solves this by scanning the full message history of any connected channel with your keyword rule (or an AI prompt).
Why this matters: A typical active Slack community generates 500–2,000 messages per day. The historical backlog is enormous — and many of those messages are leads that are still warm weeks or months later. Deep Research turns “I’ve been a member for one day” into “I have a populated pipeline of historical intent.”
How to Run Your First Deep Research Scan
- Open the Deep Research section in your Leadguru dashboard.
- Select the communities and channels you want to scan. For your first scan, select all channels across all connected accounts to maximize coverage.
- Set the time range to 3 months. This is a good starting point — long enough to surface meaningful historical signal, short enough to keep scan time fast. You can re-run with longer ranges (6 months, 12 months) later.
- Choose your rule. For your first scan, use the keyword rule you just created — no AI prompt, no Mixed Rule yet. Keep it simple. You’ll layer in AI prompts once you understand the baseline signal.
- Click Run Scan. Depending on the volume of messages across your communities, the scan completes in seconds to a few minutes.
- Review the results. Each match shows the original message, the author, when it was posted, and the channel. Click into any message to see the full thread context.
What you’ll typically see: anywhere from a handful to several hundred historical intent messages, depending on the size and activity of your communities. Most of them will be leads you can still act on today — the person who asked “recommend a CRM” three months ago is still running their business.
Reach Out with Context
The biggest advantage of Deep Research over cold outreach is context. When you message a lead found through archive analysis, you know exactly what they were looking for and when they asked.
Example outreach message:
“Hey [Name], I saw your message in [Channel] from [Date] about looking for a [service/tool]. We actually built something that solves exactly that — happy to share more if you’re still exploring options.”
This approach feels natural and helpful — not salesy. Response rates for this type of contextual outreach are 3–5x higher than cold messages because you’re responding to an existing request, not creating one from scratch.
Step 4: Iterate and Graduate to AI Prompts
Once you’ve run your first Deep Research scan and started seeing real-time leads from your keyword rule, it’s time to refine.
Test different keywords. Add phrases that came up in real conversations you didn’t initially think of. Remove phrases that produced noise. After 50–100 matched messages, you’ll have a clear sense of which keywords are working.
Move to AI prompts. When you’re ready for nuance — “find people asking for B2B SaaS tools, not job postings” or “exclude people offering services, only show those requesting” — create an AI Prompt rule. Use the same AI assistant workflow: ask ChatGPT or Claude to draft a prompt that captures your ICP, then paste it into Leadguru’s AI Prompt rule field.
Try Mixed Rules. For your highest-value channels, combine keywords (fast, free) with AI (slow, credits-based) to balance accuracy and cost. Keywords narrow the candidate pool from thousands to hundreds; AI evaluates the hundreds for genuine intent.
What Comes Next
Once your first three steps are done, you have a fully functional Leadguru setup:
- Real-time monitoring catches new intent messages as they arrive across all your communities.
- Deep Research backfills your pipeline from historical conversations any time you join a new community or want to refresh an existing one.
- Built-in CRM lets you tag, assign, and track each lead through your pipeline without leaving Leadguru.
- Identity enrichment adds real names, roles, companies, and LinkedIn profiles to leads from Slack and Discord (and to the extent available, Telegram).
- Contact export moves your data into CSV, Pipedrive, or a spreadsheet when you’re ready.
The whole first-time setup takes under 15 minutes. The first leads usually arrive within the first hour — either from historical Deep Research matches or from real-time keyword hits.
Want to go deeper on any of these steps? Read how to use Deep Research to find high-intent leads, how to find the best Slack communities for B2B lead generation, or compare Leadguru to other tools in Leadguru vs IntentHunter and Leadguru vs Leadverse.
How long does it take to set up Leadguru?
The first-time setup takes under 15 minutes: connect a Slack, Discord, or Telegram account (about 2 minutes), create your first keyword monitoring rule by asking an AI assistant to generate keywords for your business (about 5 minutes), and run your first Deep Research scan with a 3-month time range (about 5 minutes to configure, seconds to minutes to complete). Most users see their first historical leads from Deep Research within the first hour, and their first real-time matched message within the same day.
Do I need to be in private communities to use Leadguru?
You need to be a member of the Slack workspaces, Discord servers, or Telegram groups you want to monitor. Leadguru reads conversations from communities you’ve joined — it doesn’t create access to communities you aren’t part of. If you’re starting from zero, the Step 1 resource list above (Slofile for Slack, Discord Discover for Discord, TGStat for Telegram) helps you find communities worth joining. Once you’re in 5–10 relevant communities, you have enough signal for Leadguru to surface meaningful leads.
How many Slack, Discord, or Telegram accounts can I connect?
There is no limit on the number of accounts you can connect to Leadguru. You can connect multiple Slack workspaces, multiple Discord servers, and multiple Telegram accounts (including team member accounts). Many teams connect their whole sales team’s accounts so the platform sees conversations from multiple angles and surfaces more leads.
Do Keyword Monitoring Rules cost anything?
No. Keyword Monitoring Rules are free on Leadguru — keyword filtering does not use AI credits. You can run unlimited keyword rules across all your connected accounts at no extra cost. AI Prompt rules and Mixed Rules (which combine keywords with AI evaluation) do use AI credits, which are included in your subscription plan. Most new users start with keyword rules, see what the baseline signal looks like, and then graduate to AI prompts for more nuanced filtering.
What is Deep Research and why should I run it on day one?
Deep Research is a Leadguru feature that scans the full message history of any connected Slack, Discord, or Telegram channel with your chosen rule (keyword or AI prompt). Unlike real-time monitoring — which only catches messages from the moment you turn it on — Deep Research surfaces historical intent messages from weeks or months ago. For new users, running Deep Research on day one is the fastest path to a populated pipeline: instead of waiting days or weeks for real-time signals to accumulate, you start with a backlog of historical leads that are still warm today. We recommend running your first scan with a 3-month time range, all channels, and your keyword rule (no AI prompt yet) to keep it simple.
