I Built a Tool to Find SaaS Ideas People Will Actually Pay For. Here's How It Started.

A few months ago, I was having a conversation with another business owner. We were going back and forth about tools we'd each built internally, originally just to make our own lives easier, and then gradually turned into revenue streams.

He'd done it. I'd done it. And at some point in the conversation I said something like: "Wouldn't it be amazing if you could find out what tools other people need before you build them? Like, just go directly to the demand and build around it."

That was the moment PainMap was born.

Not from a detailed market research report. Not from a pitch deck. From a conversation about a problem every founder I know has run into at some point: you build something, you spend weeks or months on it, and then the market tells you it didn't need that. I wanted to solve that. So I started building.

Why I decided to build in public
I'll be honest. Building in public wasn't some calculated growth strategy.
It was partly a forcing function. If I told people what I was building, I'd actually have to finish it. Running three other businesses while shipping something new means the project can easily become "something I'm working on" indefinitely. Making it public killed that option.

It was also the right thing to do for the product. PainMap is built for indie hackers, founders and builders. Those people live on Reddit and Indie Hackers. They share their journey. They respond to people doing the same.
So I decided to be one of those people. Real updates. Real numbers. No vanity metrics.

Nearly 100 signups. Not a single pound in ads. Every signup on the PainMap waitlist right now came from Reddit. No Meta campaigns. No Google Ads. No sponsored posts. Just showing up in the right communities, talking honestly about what I was building and why, and letting the product speak for itself.

Some posts did well. Some got ignored. A few got pushed back on, which is actually useful because it tells you where your message isn't landing or where your idea has a real gap.

The posts that converted consistently weren't the ones where I led with the product. They were the ones where I described the problem. The "spent six hours on Reddit research and still don't know if this idea is worth building" problem. The "built something for three months and launched to silence" problem. People recognise that. They comment. They click. They sign up.
Almost 100 people on a waitlist without spending a single pound is a meaningful signal. Not proof of product-market fit, but proof that the problem is real and people want a solution.

What PainMap actually does
Here's the version that goes beyond "it finds pain points."
Most research tools give you discussions. You still have to decide what to build from them.

PainMap runs parallel AI research across Reddit, X, G2, Capterra and Trustpilot at the same time. It's not pulling one source and hoping for the best. It's reading the whole conversation across platforms simultaneously.
Then it does something most founders do manually and badly: it mines one and two-star competitor reviews to find the exact things existing products are failing to deliver. Those aren't just complaints. Those are feature briefs written by real users who already tried to pay for a solution and were let down.
It also extracts willingness-to-pay signals. Not guesses. Actual signals from real discussions where people talk about price, compare costs, or describe what they'd pay for a fix.

The output isn't a mood board of frustrations. It's a complete product brief. Features defined by competitor weaknesses. Pricing anchored to real WTP data. Landing page copy ready to publish. You go in with a niche or market. You come out knowing whether the idea is worth building, what it should do, and how to talk about it.

That's it.

It hasn't all been smooth sailing
I want to be clear about this because the "founder builds product, gets 100 signups in X weeks" framing often skips the bit in the middle. The bit in the middle has been a lot.

Debugging things that shouldn't have broken. Rewriting flows that made sense in my head and made no sense to a real user. Writing Reddit posts at 11pm that I wasn't sure about. Testing copy. Changing the positioning. Testing it again.
And doing all of that while running three other businesses that also have real clients, real deadlines and real problems to solve.

Some days PainMap got an hour. Some days it got less than that. There were stretches where I was convinced the whole thing needed rethinking.
What kept it moving was the waitlist. Every time someone signed up, that was a real person saying "yes, I want this." That's harder to ignore than a to-do list.

Why I think this matters
The way most people currently validate SaaS ideas is either too fast or too slow.
Too fast: you spend a weekend thinking about it, decide it feels right, and start building. Too slow: you spend weeks in spreadsheets and forums trying to synthesise research manually, and by the time you have an answer you're not sure if it's still accurate. Both approaches waste time. One wastes it on the wrong idea. The other wastes it on the research process itself.

PainMap compresses that research into something you can actually make a decision from. In the time it currently takes most founders to scan two or three Reddit threads, PainMap has read across five platforms, scored the opportunity, surfaced the competitor gaps, and handed you a brief.
That matters because the cost of building the wrong thing isn't just time. It's money, momentum and confidence. Founders who launch products that don't get traction don't always try again. That's a problem worth solving.

What happens next
PainMap is still in pre-launch. The waitlist is open and growing.
When we launch, waitlist members get discounted access, locked in before the public price goes live. The earlier you're on the list, the better that deal gets.
If you're a founder who has ever spent hours on research and still felt unsure whether the idea was worth pursuing, or built something that didn't land the way you expected, PainMap was built for you.

Join the waitlist at painmap.io. No spam. Just a heads-up when we go live and your early access offer.

If this resonated, follow along. I'll keep posting honest updates as we build toward launch.