I Spent Months Manually Validating SaaS Ideas. Then I Automated It.

Drok AI — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:27:20 +0000

Every founder I know has the same process for finding SaaS ideas. Scroll Reddit. Browse Hacker News. Read Twitter threads. Bookmark interesting complaints. Forget about them. Repeat.

I did this for months. The problem was never finding complaints. People complain about everything. The hard part was knowing which complaints were actually worth building a product around.

The Manual Process

My workflow looked like this:

Spend 2-3 hours per day reading community posts across Reddit, HN, Stack Overflow, GitHub issues, and Dev.to
Copy interesting pain points into a spreadsheet
Try to assess market size, competition, and willingness to pay
Realize I had no objective way to compare opportunities
Pick whatever felt exciting in the moment
Start building

The result? Two products nobody wanted and one that got mild interest but never converted to paying users.

The pattern was always the same. I was selecting ideas based on vibes, not data.

What I Learned

After the third failed attempt, I noticed something. The ideas that had the most potential shared specific traits:

Multiple people described the same problem independently across different platforms
People were already paying for bad solutions or building ugly workarounds
The problem was recurring, not a one-time annoyance
Search interest was trending upward, not flat or declining

The ideas I picked based on gut feeling had none of these signals. They sounded cool but did not pass any of these filters.

Automating the Process

I built Drok AI (SaaSBrowser.ai) to do what I was doing manually but at scale. It scans online communities for real pain points, then runs each one through a three-stage AI pipeline:

Validation - Is this a real SaaS opportunity or just someone venting?
Analysis - Market size, competition, feature requirements, pricing potential
Trend Enrichment - Is demand growing or shrinking?

Every idea gets scored on viability. Instead of a messy spreadsheet full of bookmarks, you get a ranked feed of opportunities backed by actual data.

The Self-Validation Feature

The part I use the most is actually the self-validation tool. If you already have an idea, you can run it through the same pipeline and get an honest assessment before writing any code. It would have saved me from building those two products nobody wanted.

What I Would Tell My Past Self

Stop reading Reddit for 3 hours a day hoping to stumble on the right idea. Either systematize the research or accept that you are gambling with your time.

The best SaaS products solve problems people are already vocal about. The signal is out there. You just need a better way to find it.

If you are in the ideation phase, check out SaaSBrowser.ai. Daily insights are free once you sign up.

DEV Community: Drok AI

I Spent Months Manually Validating SaaS Ideas. Then I Automated It.