I stopped brainstorming startup ideas — and started mining Reddit for real problems

Like many developers, I used to come up with startup ideas by… guessing.

Sometimes it felt exciting.
Most of the time, it led to building things nobody really needed.

So I changed my approach.

Instead of asking:

“what should I build?”

I started asking:

“what are people already struggling with?”

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The shift: from ideas → problems

Reddit turned out to be one of the best sources for this.

Not because of “trends” or hype,
but because people casually describe real frustrations there.

Things like:

• “I keep forgetting to follow up on emails”
• “there’s no simple way to do X”
• “I built this hacky workaround because nothing exists”

These are not ideas.
They’re raw signals.

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The problem: it's too noisy

The issue is — Reddit is chaotic.

You’ll find:

• noise
• one-off complaints
• vague frustrations
• irrelevant discussions

Manually going through threads is:

• slow
• inconsistent
• hard to scale

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My approach: turning discussions into signals

I started experimenting with a simple framework.

Instead of treating every post equally, I look for repeatable signals:

1. Strong problem signals

Clear statements of frustration:

“this is annoying”, “this sucks”, “I hate doing this manually”

2. Ask-for-tool signals

People explicitly looking for solutions:

“is there a tool for this?”

3. Workarounds

Users building their own hacks:

spreadsheets, scripts, manual processes

4. Cross-community repetition

Same problem showing up in different subreddits

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Example

Raw discussion:

“tracking follow-ups in Gmail is messy and I always forget”

Signals:

• multiple complaints
• repeated across productivity + startup communities
• users using spreadsheets as workaround

Possible direction:

a lightweight follow-up tracker with persistent reminders

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Why this works better (for me)

Compared to brainstorming:

• ideas are validated earlier
• I avoid building “cool but useless” things
• I spot patterns instead of one-off opinions

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I built a small tool for myself

To make this process less painful, I built a small internal tool:

• scans discussions
• extracts signals
• groups similar problems
• suggests possible directions

It’s still rough, but it helps me:

• validate faster
• focus on real demand
• avoid noise

👉 https://demandradar.vercel.app/

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Curious how others approach this

Do you usually:

• start from ideas?
• or from problems people already talk about?

And if you’ve tried something similar —
what signals do you look for?

Would love to learn how others think about this.