How to do market research on Reddit: finding pain points (lessons from Reddit)

The advice in these threads agrees more than you might expect. Talk to people, read complaints in the customer's own words, and don't mistake a polite yes for a sale.

• The most repeated advice is to have conversations with real people instead of relying on forms or your own guesses. As u/spiderjohnx put it in r/Startup_Ideas: "You gotta talk to humans and a lot of them" (thread).
• The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick's book on customer interviews, came up in 3 of the 10 threads we read, each time as the default recommendation.
• Start from a problem, not an idea. "By not coming up with an idea and instead finding a problem," wrote u/66EmperorPalpatine66 when asked how they validate (thread).
• Several people said complaints work best as raw copy, since customers describe their problem better than founders do.

People in these threads disagreed about how much research is enough. One reply in r/Startup_Ideas said a week of about 10 customer interviews beats half a year of analysing market segments. The same person described a two-week journal study they ran with 20 people. Nobody offered a threshold that works for every product.

They also split on surveys and AI. Some dismissed surveys for early validation, while others ran them alongside interviews. Copywriters in r/copywriting warned that AI summaries flatten the way people complain, and other posters said AI helped them organise their research faster.

Our reading is that the kind of research matters more than how much of it you do. A few conversations with people who have the problem now will tell you more than a large survey of people who might have it.

Most founders start their Reddit research in founder communities because they already spend time there. Our scans suggest demand is somewhere else.

On 17 and 18 October 2026 we sampled recent posts in 41 subreddits and scored each one for buying intent. Of the 6,507 posts, about 5% read as someone looking to buy or hire. The founder communities were near the bottom:

People in founder communities are mostly building and promoting, and few of them are buying. If you sell to IT providers or accountants, their working communities will tell you far more about their problems than a thread of other founders guessing. Each community profile lists its rules and the kind of seller it tolerates.

1. List where your buyers work. Name the job titles you sell to, then find the communities those people post in. If you already know one community and want more, our similar subreddits tool can help.
2. Search for problem phrases, not product words. Try "how do I", "is there a tool that", "I'm tired of" and "we switched from". Sort by new as well as top, so current problems show up alongside the famous old threads. Our Reddit search builder writes these queries for you.
3. Read the long posts first. A detailed complaint usually describes the workaround the person relies on today, and that is what they would replace.
4. Copy the exact words. "the 5-stars are useless because they're all 'love it' but the 3-stars list specific friction points in customer language," wrote u/Deep_Ad1959 in r/copywriting about reviews (thread). Reddit complaints work the same way.
5. Count repeats, not upvotes. One viral rant is one person. Ten people describing the same problem in different words is a pattern.
6. Then talk to them. Reply helpfully in public. If you want to run interviews, read the community's rules first, because many communities ban research requests outright.

If you can't find any complaints, one reply in r/ycombinator suggests watching people work: "If nothing annoys you, watch other people stumble through a task for 5 minutes, that's where the gold usually is" (u/Status-Desk-8457, thread).

A complaint tells you there's a problem. A request tells you someone is ready to act on it, and the wording gives it away.

Across 239 anonymised buyer requests in our scans, 79% opened with "I need" and only 5% with "I am looking for" (how buyers phrase requests). People ready to buy usually say what they need, by when, and what they already tried. People venting describe the frustration and stop there.

When you research a market, keep both lists. Complaints tell you what to build. Requests tell you whether anyone will pay for it soon. For a second opinion on a single post, our buying intent scorer will rate it.

People who sell research tools hang around market research threads. In the threads we read, one widely shared "I scanned 4,500 pain point posts" write-up came from the maker of a tool that does exactly that. One r/saasbuild thread offering to "find customers for you on Reddit" was mostly founders replying with pitches for their own products. We left those claims out of this guide. When a post ends with a link to the poster's own tool, read it as an advert, however useful its numbers look.

The scans behind these numbers, along with others, are collected under research.

Use what you read to prepare customer discovery interviews with the people who posted.

These threads come from people who chose to post, and most of them run small software products. Our scan numbers cover one window in October 2026 across 41 communities, not all of Reddit. Reddit is changing its rules for public data access between October 2026 and March 2027, and tools that read Reddit for you may change with them.

Before you build anything, pick three communities where your buyers work. Run the problem searches above in each one and write down twenty complaints in the buyers' own words. If you'd rather have new posts come to you, HearBuyers watches the communities you choose and flags the ones that read like someone ready to buy. You can try it free for 14 days.