I built a small tool to find Reddit pain points before building an MVP

QingCheng — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:29:21 +0000

AI coding has made it much faster to build small products.

But I keep running into the same problem: building is not the hardest part anymore. Choosing what to build is.

It is easy to open an AI coding tool, describe an app, and get a working prototype. It is much harder to know whether the idea is based on a real user problem or just a vague market guess.

So I built a small free tool called MVP Signal:

Reddit Pain Point Finder

It helps indie hackers and solo builders turn Reddit conversations into scored pain points and small SaaS ideas.

The problem

Reddit is useful for product research because people describe problems in their own words.

But Reddit research is messy:

You do not always know what to search for.
Reddit's own search is limited.
Google search syntax works differently from Reddit search.
One painful comment can look more important than it really is.
It is easy to collect vague opinions instead of real workflow pain.
After finding a good thread, you still need to turn it into a focused MVP scope.

What MVP Signal does

MVP Signal keeps the workflow simple:

Enter a product direction, target user, keywords, and subreddits.
Generate Google and Reddit search queries.
Paste real Reddit posts or comments manually.
Score the evidence by pain, repeat signals, pay intent, reach, and buildability.
Copy an AI Build Brief when the evidence is strong enough.

If the evidence is weak, too broad, or off-topic, the tool tells you to narrow the input before building.

What it does not do

This is not an automated Reddit scraper.

It does not:

scan all of Reddit
use the Reddit API
save user inputs
require login
claim to validate revenue
replace user interviews

The current MVP is manual on purpose: search, read, paste real evidence, score the pain, and decide whether the idea is worth building.

Example

Suppose you are researching "AI meeting notes."

Instead of immediately building another note-taking app, you can search Reddit for complaints around meeting notes, follow-up tasks, action items, Slack, and Notion.

If the evidence shows that users are not just complaining about transcripts, but specifically about follow-up tasks getting scattered across tools, the MVP brief might become much narrower:

Turn meeting notes into follow-up tasks for small teams using Notion and Slack.

That is a better starting point than "AI meeting notes app."

Try it

You can try it here: