Looking for a reddit marketing service for small business that actually feels authentic

So I've been trying to crack reddit as a lead gen channel for my agency and honestly its been rough. I have been doing the cold email thing for years and it works fine but the leads from reddit when you do it right are just... different. way warmer, they already trust you cause you helped them in a thread.

Problem is I can't scale it. I tried hiring a VA to monitor subreddits and reply but the quality tanked hard. either too salesy or they miss the nuance of each community and it comes off spammy. It got banned from two subs before I pulled the plug on that.

Then I tried doing it myself for like 3 months. I would spend 2 hours every morning scrolling r/smallbusiness r/marketing r/entrepreneur looking for posts where people were asking about stuff my agency actually solves. found some great leads ngl but its just not sustainable. I'm already managing campaigns and client calls, I can't be a full time reddit lurker too.

so now I'm hunting for a reddit marketing service for small business that gets this. not some bot that blasts generic comments. something that can actually monitor for real intent signals and help craft replies that sound like a human who knows the space. ideally with some kind of dashboard so I can see what's working and approve stuff before it goes out.

Does this even exist or am I chasing something impossible? I've seen a few tools that claim to do reddit monitoring but they all feel like they're built for big brands doing reputation management, not actual small shops trying to have real conversations.

anyone found something that actually works here? or should I just accept that reddit growth is a hand to hand combat thing you cant really outsource.