Updated May 2026
To find real customer pain points on Reddit, search the subreddits where your buyer already complains for phrases like “I hate” and “I wish there was a tool,” sort by Top in the past year, read the comments rather than the post, and look for anyone who says they'd pay to make the problem stop. Then score each recurring pain on demand, reachability, and competition.
That's the whole method. Here it is in detail — and at the end, the faster way.
Not the biggest subreddits — the ones with daily, problem-focused discussion. Look for communities with recent posts (within 24 hours), a healthy comment-to-post ratio (roughly 5–10+), and people talking about work, not memes. Three good subreddits beats twenty broad ones.
People in pain write in predictable language. Search each subreddit for “I hate”, “I wish there was”, “is there a tool that”, “how do you all deal with”, and “why is there no”. Combine with a domain word, e.g. “struggling with invoicing”. Then sort by Top → Past Year so high-upvote complaints (problems many people share) rise to the surface.
The post introduces a problem; the comments reveal how deep it goes. That's where people list the workarounds they've tried, the tools that failed them, and how much the problem actually costs them. A complaint with 40 'same here' comments is a market. A complaint with none is one person's bad day.
The strongest signal isn't a complaint — it's someone saying they would pay to make it stop, or describing a clumsy paid workaround they already use. Those sentences are gold. Also watch for self-built spreadsheets and Zapier duct-tape: a workaround is proof the demand outran the supply.
For each recurring pain, weigh three things: how often it shows up across people and threads (demand), whether you can actually reach those people to sell (reachability), and whether existing tools already solve it well (competition). A pain that's frequent, reachable, and under-served is the one worth building for.
Done properly, this takes hours per week, every week. The signal decays — last month's hot complaint is this month's solved problem — so it's not a one-time job. That's why most people do it once, get excited, and never go back.
Pannly runs this method continuously: it watches six SaaS subreddits and Hacker News, clusters the recurring complaints, scores each on demand, reachability, and competition, and writes a brief. Same method — automated, scored, and kept fresh. Here's what the output looks like:
Live from the feed. Each opens into a brief with the evidence quotes and their original Reddit and Hacker News source links.
The live feed is loading — browse the full idea feed to see every scored idea.
Prefer to keep doing it yourself? Good — the manual method above genuinely works. Either way, see how the scoring works or jump to startup ideas already pulled from Reddit.
Search inside relevant subreddits for the phrases frustration uses: “I hate”, “I wish there was a tool”, “is there anything that”, “how do you deal with”, plus a keyword from your niche. Sort by Top and Past Year so the most-upvoted complaints surface first.
Usually the comments, not the original post. Comments reveal failed solutions, workarounds, and how much the problem costs — the detail that separates a real market from a one-off rant. Pay special attention to anyone who says they'd pay for a fix.
Score it on three things: frequency (does the same pain recur across many people?), reachability (can a solo founder actually find and sell to these people?), and competition (is it already solved well?). High frequency, high reachability, weak competition is the sweet spot.
Yes — this is exactly what Pannly automates. It watches six SaaS subreddits and Hacker News continuously, clusters recurring complaints, scores them on demand, reachability, and competition, and writes a brief for each. You can do the manual method above, or browse the scored results directly.
Browsing the scored feed is free. $3 unlocks the full brief — refunded automatically if you ship within 30 days.