Stop Looking for Startup Ideas. Start Looking for Pain

Hey, thanks for the great article!

I would just suggest a slight shift in perspective: instead of looking for "pain," it might be even better to look for a "need," or specifically a "job" (as in the Jobs-to-be-Done framework). At the core, there is a job and there is a solution. "Pain" only really appears when the current solution does a crappy job of handling the user's job. So the "job" is actually what comes first.

And I 100% agree with the point about validating willingness to pay. Asking "Would you pay for this?" is a trap. Asking "How much have you spent on your current way of solving it?" is where the real truth is. This exact trick is broken down perfectly in the classic book The Mom Test. I highly recommend it!

That's an amazing business idea. Business today need to find where they should focus to get better results and more customers who can continuously engage with your product/ service. Discovering the pain points is creative idea.

One thing that could make this much stronger is showing a “proof of business” layer, not just proof of pain, e.g., which pain points already have buyers actively paying for clunky workarounds.

This is the way! Taking your ego out of it and empathizing with others pain before you solution is the first step in the right direction. Quantifying it and rating urgency and willingness to buy are where a lot of people lose the thread and don't index high enough. Would be curious to see how PainBase does that.

Interesting!

Interesting space.I think we're entering an era where building is cheap but validation is expensive. A few years ago founders struggled to build. Now founders struggle to decide which of 100 ideas is worth building. The challenge isn't finding pain anymore. It's ranking pain by willingness to pay. That's the signal I'd pay for.

One extra filter I like here: look for a workaround with an owner.

A lot of complaints are real but still too vague to build around. If I can write "this kind of person is currently solving this by doing X, and it costs them time or money," the idea feels much more concrete. If I can't fill in that sentence, I usually keep researching instead of building.

This is exactly why I'm spending time in Reddit communities before building products.

I'm trying to find problems people complain about repeatedly rather than starting with a random idea.

Have you found any specific communities that consistently surface high-quality problems?

One of the biggest problems nowadays is TIME... The tool that manages to save time on repetitive tasks is halfway to success, but only if it delivers value and something that really works in a simple and user-friendly way. Yes, that's a great help, but then the problem still needs to be validated through the Landing to test the value proposition. The real validation of the solution only happens when these frustrated users enter their credit card details or actively use an MVP. Do you have plans to automate posts about a solution, our solution/Landing provided or another from which this data was extracted, in a way that is not considered spam? This would be invaluable and would be much closer to a NO-BRAINER product...

CONGRATULATIONS and may you continue the good work.

This really resonates. While building our product, the most valuable insights came from talking directly to sellers. We spent hours on calls understanding how they worked, what frustrated them, and the hacks they had created to get around those problems. Some of our best features came straight from those conversations, not from brainstorming sessions.

The workarounds point is the one that stuck with me. people duct taping spreadsheets and manual processes together is such an underrated signal, way stronger than someone just going "cool idea." if theyre already burning time on some janky workaround the demand is basically proven.

Ive been living in reddit threads lately for a project and you can feel the difference between "that'd be neat" and "I literally do this annoying thing every week and hate it." the second one is gold.

This is great, i love the approaches

This is great, i love the approaches

This is so interesting. My main question is how do you separate real demand from the noise? Also, does it capture issues that are not a problem yet but could be soon?

This is a solid framework. The “workarounds as demand signal” point is especially underrated.

The framework is solid. The trap I'd flag from years of selling B2B software: the person who complains loudest is often not the person who signs the check. End users vent about a broken workflow all day, but the budget usually sits with someone two levels up who never feels that exact pain. I burned real time early on building for the loudest voice instead of the buyer. When you mine complaints at scale, it's worth tagging not just how often a pain shows up, but who feels it and whether that person controls spend. A frequent complaint from people with no budget authority is a clean way to build something everyone loves and nobody pays for.

power_house

I like this framing.

One thing I’d add: a good pain signal is when people already tried 2-3 different solutions and still complain about the same problem.

At that point it’s probably not just “interesting”, it’s something they actively want fixed.

This is a strong way to think about it.

One thing I'd add: complaints alone can still be misleading unless you separate "annoying" from "urgent."

The best signal is when people are already losing time, using messy workarounds, or asking what too others use. That usually means the pain has moved from opinion to behavior.

I like the framing of demand first, idea second. Makes building less like guessing

I had the same experience from the other side. I built a quick MVP after I needed to make an international call while traveling. When I decided to turn it into a real product, I found a lot of competitors. I almost dropped it. But competition was the signal, not the warning. It meant the pain was real, so I launched anyway.

The workaround signal is underrated. If someone built a spreadsheet to solve a problem you can usually skip half your validation the demand is already proven, you just have to build something better than a spreadsheet.

Good framework.

Good advice!

This resonates. I built my app around a pain I felt myself on the road — managing budget + safety while off-grid. The hard part is validating whether others feel that pain as strongly. How do you usually test that early?

Interested

That's a sharp point. I've run into this with email tools too. People complain endlessly about inbox overload, but most won't actually switch tools or change their workflow, because the switching cost feels riskier than the pain itself. The complaint is real, but the behavior is sticky.

Feels like the actual signal isn't "people are annoyed," it's "people are willing to change a habit to fix this." That's a much higher bar, and probably why so many ideas validate on paper but stall once you try to get someone to actually act on it.

I like the distinction between ideas and complaints.

One thing I've noticed though: some of the biggest startup failures don't come from solving a problem nobody has.

They come from solving a problem lots of people complain about, but not in a way that changes what they actually do.

That's where things get interesting.

The workaround filter is the part I'd keep really strict. A complaint by itself can just be noise, but a spreadsheet, Zapier chain, VA task, or messy SOP usually means the problem has already earned a budget somewhere.

One question I like asking is: "what breaks if you stop doing your current workaround for a week?" The answer tends to reveal whether it's a real operating pain or just an annoyance.

Yes the easiest way to win is solve someone's problem for free first. Repeat that pattern and charge them. Then wrap your worflow into a software. Especailly nowadays people are flooding the internet with all sorts of vibe coded products. Just reach out to them.

That's the secret (it's not a secret actually) for a successful business in general, not only SaaS. BTW, i was working on a platform that analyze pain points from people complaints and ends up with potential micro-SaaS ideas.

how does this generate those metrics, i.e, how do you quantify things like avg opportunity, high urgency, and buyer intent clues?

This matches how I found my current thing almost exactly. I work in the AI-agent hosting space, and I didn't start with an idea, I started by noticing the workarounds.

People running open-source AI agents kept building the same duct-tape: cron jobs to restart the agent when it silently died overnight, scripts to refresh expiring auth tokens, half-finished firewall rules because they'd accidentally exposed the control gateway to the internet. Nobody builds that stuff for fun. That's the "already burning time patching it themselves" signal you and urimarti are pointing at.

The willingness-to-pay tell was loud too: threads full of "what's the easiest way to host this" and "I just want it to run without babysitting it." And competitors entering the niche (a couple of big hosts moved in just this month) confirmed the market instead of scaring me off, same point Alex made.

One filter I'd add to your framework: separate "annoyed once" from "rebuilt the workaround twice." The second time someone reconstructs the same hacky fix is the moment the pain is proven. A one-off rant is venting; a maintained workaround is a product spec.

Totally agree with the framework, but the real trick to filtering out the noise of casual complaints is looking for behavior over opinions. A rant on Reddit might just be someone blowing off steam.

The gold standard is finding people sharing clunky workarounds—like a badly optimized Python script, a massive Excel macro, or a 5-step Zapier workflow that constantly breaks. The strongest demand signal isn't just how many people complain; it's how much time or manual effort they are already burning trying to patch the problem themselves. If they are actively building terrible duct-tape solutions, they are ready to buy a real product.

Completely agree with this approach. Starting with a cool idea instead of deep demand is exactly how I burned my first couple of projects.

For the last few weeks, I've been working on a tool in the AI coding space. Instead of guessing what features to build, I forced myself to just hang out in dev forums looking at what people actually hate about current workflows.

The exact patterns you mentioned stood out. People are exhausted by the "babysitting tax" (spending all night fixing broken code) and the "black box" (watching a spinner and praying it doesn't burn through a massive API bill).

Because I focused entirely on those specific complaints, the roadmap basically wrote itself. I'm actually handing a beta over to our first 15-20 testers in about a week to see if we successfully killed those pain points.

Great write-up—definitely saving this framework for the next feature cycle.

Complaints are the right starting point but worth adding one filter - repeat complaints. A one-off gripe is just venting. The same person circling back to the same friction two or three times, that's where it gets real.

Strong reframe. The point I'd add a layer to is #3, willingness to pay, because it quietly does most of the work. Plenty of loud, frequent complaints have no budget behind them. People will vent about a problem for years and still expect the fix to be free. The complaints I trust most now are the ones where someone already cobbled together a paid workaround: a spreadsheet plus a VA, three tools duct-taped together. That's a complaint with a budget attached, which is a different animal from a complaint with an audience.

Question for you: when you mine pain at scale, does it bias you toward crowded, well-understood markets? Articulated complaints tend to cluster where solutions already exist. Curious how you use PainBase to spot the gap inside a noisy market, instead of just confirming the market is noisy.

Great startup ideas come from solving real customer pain points, not chasing trends. Identify problems people face daily, understand their frustrations, and build practical solutions. A business succeeds when it removes difficulty, saves time, reduces cost, or improves life meaningfully.

The domain/niche that you target is also important. Some are more friendly with new software, others more conservative. I had the case where the complaints were present, the existing tools did not cover all user needs, I developed a tool to provide everything and solve the problems identified from the complaints. Still users were reluctant to give up their old tools and try a new tool especially from a solo dev/founder.

The shift from "what should I build" to "what are people already struggling with" is underrated.

One thing I'd add to your framework: the frequency of return matters too. Someone who complains once might just be venting. Someone who keeps coming back to the same problem — across different threads, different tools, different workarounds — that's a person who genuinely hasn't found relief yet. That's your real customer.

The workaround signal you mentioned is probably the strongest shortcut to validation. A spreadsheet someone built themselves is a product spec hiding in plain sight.

Curious if you’ve ever tracked confusion as a pain signal.

For example, if founders constantly have to explain what their product does after someone lands on the site, would you treat that the same way you’d treat a spreadsheet workaround?

Or is that a different category of problem entirely?

Interesting idea—turning scattered user complaints into structured, actionable insights can really help founders validate faster and reduce wasted build time.

In the words of Pain Bot, “All I know is pain”.

I’m also finding that as an entrepreneur I need to be continually be curious about and learning from the perspective of my clients.

Pain is the motivation behind action to change and is a consistent source of opportunity.

"Demand first, idea second" is the part I wish someone had drilled into me earlier. I spent a few months building stuff I thought was clever before it actually clicked.

This resonates with me.

I've been sharing a side project called NewsSphere recently, and the most useful feedback hasn't been feature requests or compliments.

It's been complaints.

People saying things like:

• "People miss the thread."

• "Help me understand what changed."

• "It's difficult to track the actual events."

I originally thought I was building a news visualization tool.

Those conversations made me realize the underlying problem might be context loss instead.

Still very early, but it's been a good reminder that understanding the problem is often more valuable than thinking of the next idea.

Good idea. But it's also too hard to find what people are already struggling with.

Thanks for sharing! I like this idea and recently had a need for something similar. I plan on testing this out more thoroughly.

The problem today isn't ideas! With AI and all that, everyone has one, but what's annoying is the marketing!

Seems useful. One thing I'd suggest is offering a free trial that lets users experience the full workflow before hitting a paywall. For a tool like this, seeing the quality of the insights is probably what convinces people to pay.