Updated May 2026
To analyse pain points from Reddit, don't collect complaints — score them. Weigh each recurring pain on three axes: frequency (how often it recurs across people and threads), intensity (how much it costs them), and reachability (whether you can sell to these buyers). Rank by all three, and the real opportunities separate themselves from the loud ones.
Here's the framework, then live examples already scored this way.
Count distinct people and threads describing the same problem over time, not upvotes on one post. A pain mentioned by twenty different people across six months is a market. A single viral thread is one person's bad week with an audience. Recurrence is the strongest signal a problem is real.
Read for the stakes. Are people losing money, hours, customers, or sleep? The phrases that matter: 'this costs me X a week,' 'I'd pay anything,' or a description of an elaborate workaround they built. A high-intensity pain converts; a mild annoyance gets a free tool at best.
A perfect problem you can't reach a buyer for is a hobby. Score whether these people gather somewhere you can market to without burning cash — a subreddit, a forum, a conference. Solo founders live and die on this; a reachable mediocre niche beats an unreachable great one.
None of the three axes works alone. A frequent, intense pain you can't reach a buyer for is a research paper. A reachable, intense pain that almost nobody has is a niche of one. The opportunities worth building for score well on all three at once — and those are rare enough that ranking is the entire point of the exercise.
This is the analysis Pannly automates: it clusters recurring complaints and scores each on demand, reachability, and competition, so you read a ranked list instead of a wall of threads. A few live examples:
Live from the feed. Each opens into a brief with the evidence quotes and their original source threads.
SaaS founders are losing money to unexpected AI agent run costs, needing preflight checks to block overspending.
Solo SaaS founders and indie hackers waste hours hand-coding HTML emails or paying for bloated SaaS builders.
Pair this with how to find pain points on Reddit for the full method, or jump to Reddit startup ideas.
Score each recurring complaint on three axes: frequency (how often the same pain recurs across people and threads), intensity (how much it costs them in money, time, or stress), and reachability (whether you can actually find and sell to these buyers). Rank by all three together rather than reacting to whichever post is loudest.
Upvotes measure relatability, not market size or willingness to pay. A funny rant gets upvotes; a quiet, expensive, recurring problem might not. Scoring on frequency, intensity, and reachability corrects for that bias and surfaces opportunities the upvote count would hide.
Reading gives you anecdotes. Scoring gives you a ranked list. The framework forces you to weigh a complaint's recurrence, cost, and reachability instead of falling for the first compelling story — which is exactly how good ideas get separated from loud ones.
Pannly runs this analysis continuously across six SaaS subreddits and Hacker News, scoring each clustered pain on demand, reachability, and competition. The examples below are live. Each links to a brief with the evidence and its source threads.
Browsing the scored feed is free. $3 unlocks the full brief — refunded automatically if you ship within 30 days.