To find real customer pain points, search the places people complain without being asked: Reddit, one to three star reviews of existing tools, Hacker News, niche forums and support communities. Search for the problem in their words, not your solution. Keep a quote only if it is recent, specific, and shows the pain already costs time or money.
This is the first evidence step in the idea evaluation guide for a reason. A complaint written before you arrived is free of the politeness that bends every interview, and it costs nothing but an afternoon. This post is the detailed version of that step: where to look, what to type, how to judge what you find, and how to record it so it still means something in a month.
Where to look
| Source | What you find there | What to search or read |
|---|---|---|
| People describing a bad week in detail, often with the workaround they settled on. | The subreddit for the job, not the industry. r/accounting beats r/fintech. Search the task, then sort by new and by top. | |
| Review sites (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot) | Paying customers explaining what the incumbent gets wrong. | One to three star reviews of the tools you would replace. The "dislikes" part of a mostly positive review is often more honest than an angry one. |
| App Store and Google Play | Consumer pain, specific to a version and a date. | Low-star reviews of the top apps in the category, filtered by rating where the store allows it. Look for the same complaint across several apps. |
| Hacker News | Technical buyers comparing tools and explaining why they built their own. | HN search for "Ask HN" plus the task, and comments on launches of competing products. |
| Tool support forums and feature request boards | Pain with a count attached: votes and "+1" replies. | The most-voted open requests on an incumbent's public board, especially old ones the company has not acted on. |
| Niche forums and communities | Practitioners talking to each other in their own vocabulary. | Trade forums, professional groups, Slack and Discord communities. Read the rules first; many are private and not for quoting. |
| Job posts | Pain that already has a budget. | Roles whose description is mostly the manual task your product would automate. A company paying a salary to do it has priced the problem for you. |
Start with the source closest to the person who would pay. A complaint from a user who cannot buy anything is weaker than the same complaint from the person holding the budget.
Search operators that do most of the work
Site search on Reddit and most forums is weak. A general search engine with a few documented operators is usually faster: quotes for an exact phrase, site: to stay on one domain, a minus sign to exclude a word, and after: or before: to limit by date. Combine them with phrases people only write when something hurts.
- site:reddit.com "how do you" [task] finds people asking for a method, which means the current one is not obvious.
- site:reddit.com "I hate" [task or tool] and "is there a tool" [task] find frustration and unmet demand directly.
- [competitor] "switched from" and [competitor] alternative find people leaving, and they usually say why.
- [task] "spreadsheet" and [task] "manually" find the workaround, which is the clearest sign a problem is real.
- after:2025-06-01 added to any of the above keeps you to recent posts. A pain from 2019 may have been solved since.
- [task] -[your category word] removes vendor content marketing, which ranks well and tells you nothing about customers.
Pain or gripe: four tests
Everyone complains about everything, so finding complaints proves little on its own. What you are looking for is a complaint that passes most of these tests.
| Test | Real pain | Passing gripe |
|---|---|---|
| Frequency | The same problem described independently by many people in different places. | One viral thread, echoed in the replies. |
| Workaround | People describe the spreadsheet, script, assistant or extra tool they use to cope. | People complain and carry on as before. |
| Cost | Hours a week, lost customers, fines, a hire. The cost is named. | "Annoying", "clunky", "ugly". |
| Recency | Posts from the last year or two, still getting replies. | Old threads about a version that no longer exists. |
Workarounds are the strongest single signal. Someone who built a spreadsheet to cope has already shown they will spend effort on the problem, and effort is the closest public proxy for money.
How to log what you find
Copy the words exactly
Paste the sentence as written, typos included. Tidying a quote is the first step toward inventing one. If you need to summarise, do it outside the quote marks and label it as your summary.
Keep the link and the date
Use the permalink to the comment or review, not the thread. A quote without a source cannot be checked by you in a month or by an investor next quarter.
Note who is speaking
Record the role and context ("practice manager, 12-person clinic"), not the username. It tells you whether this is the buyer, and it keeps names out of your deck.
Tag what it is evidence for
Is it about the problem existing, the price people pay today, or a competitor's weakness? Tagging makes gaps visible: twenty quotes about the problem and none about money is a finding.
Never merge quotes
Two people saying similar things are two quotes. A composite quote that reads better than either is fiction, however faithful it feels.
What a useful log looks like
Illustrative sample — paraphrased, not quoted from a real source
Three entries for an imagined idea, scheduling software for small physiotherapy clinics. Notice that the third argues against it and is kept anyway.
“I spend every Monday morning rebooking the slots from last week's cancellations by phone.”
Clinic owner, physiotherapy subreddit (illustrative)
“We pay for the booking tool but still keep a paper waitlist because it can't handle it.”
Two-star review of a clinic booking app (illustrative)
“Honestly the receptionist handles it fine, I wouldn't pay for another tool.”
Reply in the same thread (illustrative)
Look just as hard for counter-signals
A search for complaints finds complaints. To avoid fooling yourself, run the opposite searches too: [task] "not worth it", [tool] "went back to", [task] "overkill". Read the replies under the angry posts, where people often explain why the problem is smaller than it looks or already solved.
Counter-signals are not a reason to stop. They tell you who does not have the problem, which narrows who does. A log that only ever confirms the idea is a sign the search was too narrow, and the competitor analysis guide covers how to read the tools those people are already happy with.
Respect the places you read
Reading public posts and quoting a sentence with a link is normal research. Bulk-collecting them is a different matter: Reddit's User Agreement, for example, says scraping the service without Reddit's prior written consent is prohibited. Check the terms of any site before automating anything, and do not quote from private communities outside them without permission.
When you reach out to someone whose post you found, say how you found it and ask a question about their experience. Do not pitch. The customer interviews guide covers what to ask once they reply.
How Truewick does the first pass
After each evaluation, Truewick gathers cited evidence in the background at no extra credit. It runs up to five web searches for people describing the problem in their own words on Reddit, forums, review sites and Hacker News, and keeps up to eight short verbatim quotes, each linked to the page it came from. It also looks for competitors and their published pricing, and gives a read on whether demand looks rising, flat or declining.
It is told never to invent a quote, price or link, and to return nothing rather than pad a thin result. It is also told to look for people arguing against the idea. Those counter-signals are shown at the same weight as supporting quotes, and each scoring dimension shows how many of its quotes argue against it, so a one-sided read is visible.
Treat it as a head start on your log, not a replacement for the manual search. Five searches will not find every community, and the conversations that change your mind usually come from the thread you read at the end of the afternoon.