Nearly 90% of social media comments from brands go unanswered, according to Hank Leber, co-founder of Stanify, who points to the gap as an indication that brands may be underutilizing one of their most direct customer channels. Stanify, founded in Los Angeles in 2025, is built around the premise that recent advances in AI make large-scale, real-time engagement operationally feasible.

Stanify deploys AI to help enterprise brands manage comment sections and direct messages across social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. The platform removes harmful content, drafts on-brand replies, detects purchase and complaint signals, and converts the resulting interaction data into actionable business intelligence. In roughly 10 months in the market, Hank reports that the company has processed close to three million comments, drawing enterprise clients across consumer packaged goods, gaming, automotive, and telecommunications.

“Your brand can engage with every single customer in exactly the way they want to be engaged with, instantly, in the brand’s voice, in relevant ways, at scale, for almost no money,” Hank says. “That’s the opportunity.”

Hank spent more than 15 years helping brands understand social media, including building and selling ExecuteLA, a growth marketing agency, to Hawke Media, and co-founding League of Play, a live-streamed creator competition platform. Stanify co-founder and CEO Hassan Salahuddin previously built Vidpresso, a live-streaming platform that went through Y Combinator in 2014 and was subsequently acquired by Meta, where Salahuddin spent four years overseeing creator media partnerships across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.

“I’ve been working on this for 10 years. The technology just wasn’t there to do what I believed was possible,” Hank says.

Safety First: The Enterprise Gateway

When Stanify launched, its pitch centered on engagement: help brands build loyalty by responding to fans in the comment section at scale. That framing changed early, during a conversation with an enterprise brand’s team that reoriented the company’s understanding of its own product.

The team’s first response to Stanify’s engagement pitch was not enthusiastic. It was a question: could the platform find and remove negative comments?

“They said, ‘What can you do with those?’ And we said, ‘We can hide them,'” Hank recalls. The hiding mechanism works through platform APIs: the person whose comment is hidden still sees it in their feed, but no one else does. The Unilever team wanted to know how fast the process could work. “We said instantly, ‘At scale.’ And they said, ‘Great. We’d like to start on Monday.'”

The discovery changed Stanify’s go-to-market approach entirely. Large brands, Hank found, had been reluctant to engage with comment sections precisely because the environment was unpredictable. A single negative exchange going viral represented a material PR risk. Removing that threat first unlocked everything else.

“The negativity and the safety need to be there,” he says. “For the big CPGs and enterprise companies, the peace of mind that came from safety allowed them to be more innovative on the rest.”

Three Layers, One Platform

Stanify’s product operates across three functional areas. 

The first is Brand Safety: automated removal or hiding of harmful content based on categories brands define, covering profanity thresholds, spam, harassment, competitor mentions, and custom terms. The major platforms support this approach, Hank notes, because brand pages are treated as spaces that brands have the right to curate.

The second is Engagement. Stanify drafts replies to comments and DMs in the brand’s own voice, built from everything the company has published online. The system operates in any language and accounts for regional variations, including the distinctions between Mexican, Argentine, and Castilian Spanish. Most enterprise clients use a human-in-the-loop model, in which Stanify drafts replies, and a community manager approves them before they are posted.

“We do 99% of the work,” Hank says, “and then let the creative humans with their judgment do the finish.”

The third layer is Workflows: detecting intent signals within comments, such as purchase interest, complaint escalation, or support needs, and routing them accordingly. A user signaling purchase intent might receive a product link. A complaint might be quietly moved to a DM thread before it attracts public attention.

Comments as Business Intelligence

The most consequential discovery during Stanify’s first year in the market had nothing to do with replies. It was what the comment data itself could reveal about a brand’s customers.

Traditional brand intelligence sources, including surveys, focus groups, and internal analytics, are costly, time-consuming, and often lag real-time customer sentiment by weeks or months. Comment sections, by contrast, reflect what customers actually think, in their own language, without editorial filtering.

“People don’t hold back there,” Hank says. “It’s the raw truth. It’s just been so hard to get the gold out of there because it’s like gold dust.”

Stanify generates a monthly actionable insights report for enterprise clients, synthesizing sentiment patterns by post, product, time of day, and campaign. The platform tracks not just aggregate positivity and negativity but their specific drivers: what users like about a product, what frustrates them about shipping, and which content formats generate the deepest responses.

“We’ve uncovered this whole world,” Hank says. “We built something to do replies and discovered that this is the most important way to understand your business. It’s a really big deal.”

The ROI Problem

For Hank, the case for why brands left comment sections unmanaged for so long is simple. Human community managers cannot scale with the comment volumes large brands generate across multiple platforms, in multiple languages, around the clock. Pre-AI automation delivered generic, canned responses that carried no brand voice and offered no value. The ROI on human investment simply was not there.

“The bigger the business, the bigger the problems, the larger the opportunities missed,” Hank says.

He frames the broader industry trajectory in three eras. Social 1.0, roughly 2009 to 2012, was the period when brands were taught to be present on social media at all. Social 2.0 introduced scheduling and social listening tools like Hootsuite, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social, which automated the minimum. Social 3.0, his term for the current moment, is when brands can engage meaningfully with any customer at any scale, in real time.

“Social becomes more valuable to business than it’s ever been before,” Hank says. “It’s not a little tiny feature added to Hootsuite. This is a new way for customers and businesses to engage with each other.”

Stanify is currently live on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, with YouTube approved and integration with Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Reddit in progress. The company now plans to expand from its current enterprise focus into mid-market businesses.

Beyond the Comment Section

In response to customer demand, Stanify has added post scheduling and social listening to its platform, extending toward what Hank describes as a single operational hub for brand social presence. Enterprise clients have begun asking whether the platform could extend to WhatsApp channels and email, a signal Hank reads as pointing toward something larger.

“What is the world telling us that we’re doing?” he says. “It could be that Stanify is the brain of the business in a consumer sense.”

Whether the addressable market proves to be social media management or something broader, the near-term priority is converting brands that have spent years dismissing their comment sections.

“Every comment is an opportunity,” Hank says. “The comment section is as important as any other data source your business has. It’s just been so hard to extract… until now.”

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