"scratching my own itch” → to mining the itches of others
Hey IH 👋
We’ve all heard the advice: “scratch your own itch.”
But what if you could see the itches of thousands of others, in real time?
That’s the idea behind ProblemMiner.
I’m experimenting with an AI multi-agent system that scouts communities like Reddit & Indie Hackers and distills scattered posts into short, structured problem statements.
Instead of scrolling for hours, you get a Problem Digest: recurring pains, tagged by persona (e.g., indie dev, student, DTC owner), domain (e.g., productivity, ecommerce), and scored for severity.
Why I’m building this
Like many of you, I’ve built several things nobody wanted. The missing piece was always validation. I wanted a way to see if the problems I was working on were shared by others.
So I flipped the script:
- Scouting agents fetch posts.
- Extractors compress them into 1-line problems.
- Classifiers add signals: severity, willingness-to-pay proxy, etc.
- Digest builder curates the top problems into a skimmable list.
The idea: help founders and builders start from pain, not imagination.
Example problems from this week’s digests
- Solo founders struggle to validate ideas and gather feedback before launch.
- Travelers waste time researching trips across unreliable sources.
- Local restaurants can’t match big chains’ online storefronts → bad UX.
- People want to journal daily but drop the habit — tools feel heavy.
What’s next
- Right now I’m sharing digests on X and via a landing page.
- Next step: grow to 100 subscribers and learn what’s most useful (frequency, signals, clustering).
- Future idea: allow founders to attach their solutions to problems → creating a “problem→solution graph” that links pain with products.
👉 You can check out the landing page here: Problem Miner
I’d love feedback from this community:
- Would you use a feed like this for validation or sparking ideas?
- What extra signals would make it more useful (recurrence, severity, WTP, etc.)?
- Does this sound more like a side tool or a potential core product?
