I use my own tool to decide what I build next

I built Pain Radar.

It scans the internet for what people are actually frustrated about, clusters the complaints into themes, and scores each on real demand and how monetisable it is.

Then it writes you the brief, what to build, and why.

Stop guessing what to make.

→ painradar.co (free weekly digest, no card)

I stopped trying to come up with start up ideas. The good ones were never in my head anyway, they were sitting in other people's complaints.

Here's what I believe after a while of building: the best opportunity isn't a clever idea, it's a problem people are already frustrated about, loudly, in public. Solve a real problem and the money's already waiting on the other side. The hard part was never the building, it was knowing what was actually worth building.

So instead of brainstorming, I built a machine to find the problems for me.

It's called Pain Radar. Every day it scans the places people vent YouTube comments, Google searches, strips the noise, clusters the complaints into themes, and scores each one on how painful it is, how common, and how monetisable. For the ones worth chasing, it writes a one-page brief: what to build, who for, and why now.

The part I like most, I point it at its own data to decide what I build next. I built a layer on top that filters thousands of pains down to the handful a solo dev could realistically ship, scored for how buildable they are and how well they fit my stack. So my roadmap isn't a hunch anymore. The radar picks it.

I'll be honest about where this is: it's early. I'm a solo builder and a vibe coder. I steer the strategy and an AI agent writes the code. There are tens of thousands of complaints and a few hundred scored opportunities in there now, and exactly zero users. I'm growing the data slowly on purpose to keep costs sane, and building the whole thing in public from day one.

The reason I'm sharing it here. My goal is to find the pain so other builders don't have to guess what to make. I genuinely want you to win too, if you're stuck on what to build, that's exactly who this is for.

So I'm curious how the rest of you do it. When you start something new, are you going off gut and a hunch, or something more systematic? What's actually worked for you?