Customer pain points: how to find them in your buyers' own words

"Customers struggle with onboarding" is too vague to act on. The sentence behind it is better: "I spend two hours a week chasing clients for signatures before I can invoice them." That gives you the job, the cost and the situation. It also gives you copy you can use, because it is how the buyer would describe the problem to a friend. This is the core of voice of customer work.

Your words for the problem are usually different from theirs. You say "workflow automation"; they say "I'm tired of copying data between three tabs". Searching and writing in their phrasing finds more of them and persuades faster.

Many posts mix two types. Tag each post with its main type, and add a second if it matters. The tags show you which type dominates in your market.

1. Support tickets and call recordings. Your own customers, unprompted.
2. Sales call notes. The objections and first questions.
3. Reviews of products like yours. Read what people complain about in competitors' public reviews, but remember that review sites attract extreme experiences.
4. Public communities. Subreddits where your buyers ask for help, and X searches for the phrases they use. The customer research methods guide explains how to run a public-conversation study.
5. Survey free-text answers. The open box often beats the multiple choice.

1. Collect 40 to 50 sentences. Copy the line that states the problem, plus the date and the community. Strip usernames.
2. Underline the verb. "Reconcile", "chase", "export", "cancel". The verb names the job.
3. Write the pain in a fixed shape. "When ___ happens, I can't ___, so I ___." This turns varied phrasing into comparable items.
4. Group similar items. Resist the urge to create ten groups. Aim for four to seven themes.
5. Rank by frequency and intensity. Count the sentences in each group, then mark which ones include a cost, a deadline or strong language. Frequent and intense beats frequent and mild.
6. Check against another source. Do the same themes appear in your tickets? If a theme shows up in only one source, treat it as a hypothesis.

In our scans on 16 October 2026, people looking for software described their needs in sentences like these (paraphrased, identifying details removed):

• "I need a tool that automatically detects and removes personal information from documents before sharing them."
• "I need a bookkeeping tool that reconciles Stripe and ecommerce payouts into QuickBooks including fees, refunds and chargebacks."
• "I need software for nontechnical clients to organize emails and documents into a timeline and export it for legal review."

Written in the fixed shape, these become: "When I share a document, I can't be sure personal data is gone, so I check by hand." "When payouts arrive, I can't match them to orders, so I reconcile in a spreadsheet." The pain is the manual workaround, and the workaround is a feature request in disguise.

Intensity shows up in four ways: a stated cost ("costs me two hours a week"), a deadline ("before tax season"), an emotion ("sick of"), or an attempt already made ("I tried three tools").

• Use the buyer's phrase, lightly edited, as your headline. "Stop reconciling payouts by hand" beats "Automated financial reconciliation".
• Turn the sentences into the queries you use to find new buyers.
• In sales calls, ask "what do you do about this today?" and listen for the workaround.
• On the roadmap, a frequent, intense pain with no good workaround is a feature.
• For content, treat each theme as an article your buyers would search for.

In the research on how buyers phrase requests, 194 of 241 anonymised requests across 19 niches opened with "I need" (scans of 16 to 18 October 2026). So "I need" is a better phrase to search than "looking for".

• Not everyone who posts is a buyer. The people who write posts are only a slice of your market.
• Online, intensity runs high. People post when they're frustrated, so weight the pattern across posts, not the loudest one.
• Ask permission before quoting. Don't publish someone's exact words with their name. Paraphrase and remove identifying details.
• Skip sensitive topics. HearBuyers never publishes posts that reveal health, sexuality, religion, politics, immigration, crime, death or family crises, and a pain-point study shouldn't either.
• Reddit's access is changing. Its public data access changes between 31 October 2026 and March 2027, so tools that read Reddit may cover less in that window. Reading threads by hand still works.

A spreadsheet can handle all of this. Software starts to help when volume grows. See the best voice of customer tools for named options, and the best customer research tools list for interview and survey software.

Rising costs, tasks that eat hours every week, systems that don't talk to each other, and fear of making a mistake. The examples in the table above use each type.

Read 40 support tickets or 40 public posts and copy the sentence that states the problem. Group them and count. A few hours of that beats weeks of guessing.

A pain point is the problem the person feels. A need is what they think will fix it. People often state the need ("I need a spreadsheet template") when the pain is something else ("I can't see which invoices are overdue"). Ask what's behind the request.

It's a larger practice that collects what customers say in surveys, calls, tickets and public posts. Finding pain points is one of its main outputs.

Open your last twenty support tickets, or a community where your buyers ask for help. Copy the problem sentence from each into a spreadsheet and underline the verb. When you finish, you have your first themed list.