We once asked a language model to rate how bad 79 customer complaints were, from 0 to 1. It put 73 of them at 0.7 or higher. Every gripe was a crisis. So we stopped asking it to judge, and started counting. That one change is most of this guide.
Finding pain points on Reddit is not hard. Reddit is a wall of people describing what annoys them. The hard part is telling a complaint that means “build this” from one that means “I had a bad Tuesday”. You do that by counting people, not posts, and by keeping the link to every quote you plan to act on.
Search Google, not Reddit
Reddit’s own search is weak. It leans on titles and recent posts. The sentence you want is usually a comment on a thread from two years ago. Google has that comment. Reddit’s search box mostly doesn’t.
So open Google and type the site filter with a phrase in quotes:
site:reddit.com "is there a tool" invoicing
site:reddit.com "how do you deal with" late payments
site:reddit.com "anyone else" "spreadsheet" bookkeeping
The phrases that find people asking, in rough order of how often they turn up something real:
| Phrase | What it tends to find |
|---|---|
| “is there a tool”, “is there an app” | Someone who has already looked and failed |
| “how do you handle”, “how do you deal with” | A workaround, and often the cost of it |
| “anyone else”, “am I the only one” | A complaint fishing for company. Count the replies |
| “I ended up”, “what I do is” | A person describing the fix they built themselves |
| “switched from”, “cancelled”, “gave up on” | A rival’s customer on the way out |
Add a year to the end of the query, or use Google’s Tools menu to limit to the past year. A thread from 2019 tells you the problem is old. It doesn’t tell you it’s still open.
Reddit’s traffic from Google has grown about ten times since early 2023, according to Semrush. That matters for you in one way. Threads are easier to find now, and there are more of them. It does not mean more of them are worth reading.
Which subreddit? Not the founder ones
Skip r/startups and r/Entrepreneur for this job. Everyone there is selling. Go where your buyer complains about their week. That’s r/msp for IT providers, r/accounting for bookkeepers, r/HVAC for contractors. We sorted the founder subs by job in best subreddits for founders. The short version: the sub that matters almost never has “startup” in its name.
Once you have the room, sort by Top for the past year. Read the top forty. Not to find complaints, but to learn the words. A bookkeeper does not say “reconciliation pain point”. She says “the client sent me a shoebox again”. Search with her words, not yours.
How to tell venting from demand
This is the part the other guides skip. Not every complaint is a pain point. A pain point is a complaint someone has already paid for, in money or in hours. Sort what you read into three piles.
| The post says | What it’s worth |
|---|---|
| “I hate that X does this.” Nothing more. | Venting. Note it, don’t count it. |
| “I hate X, so I do Y instead, and Y takes an hour.” | A workaround. That hour is the price they’re paying today. Count it. |
| “I’d pay for something that did Z. Does it exist?” | Asking for a fix. Count it twice, and save the link. You’ll want to reply. |
The workaround pile is the one founders miss. A person who built a spreadsheet or a Sunday routine to avoid a problem has answered your question. The problem is real, it costs them time, and no product they found solved it. That last part is your gap.
Upvotes are not buyers. A thread with 400 upvotes and no workaround in the comments is a joke that landed. A thread with 12 upvotes and eight people describing what they do instead is demand.
How many threads is enough
Count people, not posts. One person posting the same gripe in four subs is one person.
Then write your pass mark before you search, so the result can’t move it. Something like: “five different people, in five different threads, describing this problem in their own words, within the past year”. Pick your own numbers. Just pick them first. We wrote out how to set a pass mark for each stage in the four-gate framework. The rule is the same here. A number decided after you’ve read the threads means whatever you need it to mean.
Stop searching when the sentences start repeating. That usually happens sooner than you’d think. If you’re at thirty threads and still surprised, you’re probably reading two different problems. Split them.
Keep the link. Every time
Every quote you plan to use gets its URL next to it. In a spreadsheet, a doc, wherever. This is not tidiness. It’s what makes the quote worth anything.
Three reasons. You’ll want to go back and reply to that person once you have something, and you can’t reply to a screenshot. You’ll want to check the date when someone asks “is this still a problem?”. And the quote you remember is never quite the quote they wrote. Memory sands the edges off. The link keeps them.
This is also the rule we built our own report around. Every complaint it shows has the thread it came from beside it. Sometimes the reading turns up a claim we can’t trace to a page. The report says so, and keeps it apart from the ones we could. A pain point you can’t link to is a guess with a quotation mark on it.
What to do with the pile
In this order.
Write your page in their words. Take the three complaints that repeated most and put them on the page nearly verbatim. Not your positioning. Their sentence. The people who wrote it will recognise it, and that’s the point.
Turn the complaints into interview questions. “Tell me about the last time the client sent you a shoebox” is a question you can only write after reading the thread. It asks about the past, which is the whole trick of the Mom Test. People lie about what they’d do. They’re accurate about what they did.
Reply where somebody asked. Go back to the “does this exist?” threads. Answer the question, plainly, from your own account. Say what you’re building and why it fits what they asked. That’s not marketing. That’s a person answering a person. How to do it without getting the post removed is in how to get users from Reddit.
The mistakes that make the pile lie to you
Reading only the top posts. Top for the year is the highlight reel. The problem that costs people the most is usually on page three with a boring title.
Counting upvotes as people. Covered above, but it’s the mistake we see most.
Reading your own subreddit. If you sell to founders, fine. If you don’t, r/SaaS will tell you what founders think buyers want. That’s a different dataset.
Trusting a summary with no links. Ours or anyone’s. If you want to see how we do it, the idea validation tool shows each quote beside the thread it came from. Then it counts them into a score you can check. And if you want to compare that against the report generators, the honest table is in best idea validation tools.
Either way, the method above works with a browser and a spreadsheet. It takes an afternoon. It’s the cheapest evidence you will ever gather, and the only kind that comes with a link.