How to find problems to solve on Reddit
When you’re starting a business, solving real problems comes first. In addition to having a clear understanding of your audience’s challenges, you also need to determine how urgent those problems are and explore related challenges that help refine your messaging and connect with your ideal audience.
Now, I’ll first walk you through the key principles. Then, I’ll also show you my favorite way of finding the problems that people will pay to get solved for them.
Let’s dive in!
How Do You Find a Problem Worth Solving?
A good problem consists of three things:
- There is an obvious pain that your audience feels every time they come across this problem.
- The problem affects them so much that they are willing to part with their money to solve it. (In certain cases, paying to solve the problem could also help them generate more revenue.)
- Your competitors aren’t solving it yet – or aren’t solving it adequately.
Finally, an important prerequisite is that you are able to solve that problem. In the guide, I’ll walk you through an example of a community I know and love (gardening). And while having in-depth insider knowledge isn’t a must, it’s certainly helpful for asking the right sub-questions to identify the best solutions later on.
That said, let’s look at how you can start gathering ideas to refine and validate!
The Best Method? Gather Product Ideas from Conversations in Online Communities
Online communities such as Reddit are a huge source of inspiration for uncovering business ideas. It's where your target customers gather to connect with like-minded people, share their struggles, ask questions, and recommend solutions.
By tapping into these conversations, you can uncover unmet needs in a market, refine solution requirements, and even connect with your ideal customers to validate your ideas.
What makes Reddit extra special is its anonymity. Unlike other platforms, Reddit gives users the freedom to be brutally honest. You'll find detailed, visceral opinions, and sometimes even demographic details like age and gender.
That said, Reddit’s tagline is “dive into anything,” and they mean it. The sheer volume of information can quickly become overwhelming. That’s why I built GummySearch.
GummySearch is a search engine built for Reddit, with AI features to help you cut through the noise and get straight to the insights that matter (pain point patterns, solution requests, advice requests, and more). It’s designed to make customer research easier, whether you’re looking for product ideas, trying to understand your audience’s pain points, or validating a solution.
This guide shows how to use GummySearch to dive into an audience and find inspiration for business ideas. Although it focuses on Reddit, the same methods can be used for communities on other platforms.
Finding Problems to Solve on GummySearch
Today we're going to take on the persona of an app developer looking to build an app but doesn't know what it should be yet.
If you’re unsure where to start, try picking an existing hobby or interest. If you do pursue a new venture, you'll be spending lots of time with this type of customer, so you might as well pick someone you have common interests with :)
My pick for today's walkthrough? Gardening! 🍃🌳🍏🥦
1. Finding Your Audience's Communities
Reddit is a massive place, and the first thing we'll do is find the corner where the Gardeners hang out.
I wrote a detailed guide on finding Subreddits which outlines the steps to take to find all relevant Subreddits and put them in a GummySearch Audience for easy research. I won't go over these steps here, so if you haven't made an Audience on GummySearch before, please read it!
Here's the end result: 13.8 million Gardeners across 11 different Subreddits. Wow! Let's dive in.
2. Dive Into Suggested Targeted Conversations
The Audience feature on GummySearch automatically suggests several targeted keyword searches, which let you dive into different categories of conversations. You can filter your search by topics focused on what the target audience is looking for, as well as what they love (or hate).
Apart from Top Content and Hot Discussions, each suggestion category has many keyword suggestions you can choose from to find insightful conversations.
For example, in "Solution Requests," one of the keyword suggestions is "Looking for" which condenses potential requests for tools, solutions, plant types and more.
However, as an application developer, I might find more use out of "Any apps" or "Any websites" type of keyword searches.
Pretty cool, right? Here are even more themes you can leverage…
Top Content
This filter refers to top content over the past month. It’s helpful to determine what kind of things these communities discuss and the format for top-performing content. This feature is mostly for those looking to publish content. However, you can also use it to spot patterns in trending conversations (perhaps for problems no one is solving yet!).
Now, you’ll find a lot of content in there, so it’s best to either look for Common patterns, where the GummySearch AI will group things of significance like a pattern of folks whose tomatoes don’t look right…
… or, if you already have a good idea of the kind of problem you want to solve, you can ask the AI a question:
This is where GummySearch’s AI helps, as it saves hours and hours you’d spend reviewing posts manually and synthesizing information. Instead, you can ask it a question and get a summarized, relevant answer!
Hot Discussions
This one refers to the current buzz happening in these Subreddits, with plenty of insightful comments. It’s helpful for catching up with your audience to see what’s trending. Like in the Top Content above, Hot Discussions can unearth fresh problems that no one else is solving.
Again, you can look for Common patterns or Ask a question to get straight to problem-solving. In our case, running a Common patterns search in this week’s popular discussions unearths patterns like identifying curious melons and hearing about winter gardening challenges.
Solution Requests
These are people asking for tools, applications, websites, and solutions from their fellow community members; helpful for assessing the kinds of solutions that meet your audience’s needs. Be sure to follow through and read the comments on these posts, as that'll help you identify competitors and their gaps.
Advice Requests
These people are asking for advice or resources, which shows what informational materials are missing from their day-to-day. If you’re looking to write blog posts or release an info-product, this one is a treasure trove!
Pain & Anger
Enough said! These conversations are going to contain frustration and anger. Very helpful for figuring out what the most painful problems are in these communities, what the poster has tried, and what the community suggests as a way to solve the problem. If you want passionate customers, find problems they’re passionate about solving.
Ideas
Conversations containing ideas for tools that should exist, or ways that the world could be different. Helpful for identifying ideas that people closer to the problem could have.
Money Talk
The “Money Talk” category refers to users talking about spending money, budgeting, and pricing. Since you’re looking to start a business, these are good conversations to understand your audience’s spending patterns, AKA: what they find worth paying for.
Opportunities
These are conversations around things that could be better. This includes opportunities for automation, making processes faster, and making user experiences better. Here you’ll likely find conversations about potential competitors and their gaps.
3. Read & Organize Conversations
At this point, you'll be diving into a good amount of insightful conversations, and GummySearch can help you get the most out of them and stay organized during your ideation process. Here are a few helpful features you'll use.
Browse View
See the highlighted keywords we are searching for at a glance. View the full contents by clicking on it.
Click Out to Reddit
You can Click out to Reddit to view comments. If you have viewed a post on Reddit, it'll have a green checkmark, so you know you've been there.
Save Conversations to Lists
You'll likely come across several “families” of conversations that interest you. Save them to individual lists for later reference.
When you identify a problem you want to dive deeper into, you can use the list to reach out to the people who posted them and ask to interview them.
Browse conversations, view them on Reddit, and save interesting ones to lists on GummySearch
4. Identify Gaps From Competitors
After diving into these communities for a few minutes, I found a shockingly large amount of Reddit submissions that were all related to one another.
For example, many users need help with identifying mushrooms in their gardens. They’re either asking their community for help identifying based on a photo or asking about apps that can help them.
When following some posts to Reddit to view the comments, I found one app named "iNaturalist". Competitor names are fantastic keywords to search within your audience so that you can see what the community thinks of existing solutions.
All you have to do is go to your preferred Audience page and type in your competitor’s brand name as the keyword.
Searching for iNaturalist, the existing solution that some folks recommended
Looking at some of these conversations, I found a lot of folks questioning the results that iNaturalist provided. It looks like a general app helpful for identifying other species, but falls short in identifying mushrooms. Because there are so many people on Reddit asking for such solutions, it seems there could be an app opportunity here!
💡 At this point, I've found a problem within my audience, and I have an idea. I might make a competitor app to iNaturalist that ONLY focuses on identifying succulent or mushroom plants. Since it'll be more targeted, I'm going to make sure that the results are the best they can be. The people who want it are asking for it!
I know, this idea might seem like a plant (teehee) for this guide. I assure you, I picked Gardeners by chance and the unmet need was quite obvious from there.
If anyone wants to pursue this app idea, go for it! I'll even help you get your initial users, I don't think it'll be very hard!
When browsing, you can also track keywords to stay updated on new conversations. If a new Reddit submission containing your keyword gets posted, you’ll be the first to know!
Next Steps: Validate Your Solution
Now, I want to be clear: finding some conversations on Reddit is great for inspiration, but those conversations don't mean you have a fully validated business idea on your hands.
I would highly recommend validating your idea with real potential customers before building any product that serves them, to make sure the problem you are solving is real and one that you can make a business out of:
- Define the problem: Write down the specific problem you aim to solve and who experiences it. Focus on the issue, not the solution. Your findings may lead to pivots!
- Understand if it’s a good problem to solve: The best problems are tangible, solvable, timely, and financially viable. Can you say that for the problem you want to solve?
- Identify risks: Break down risks into product (can you build it?), market (will people pay for it?), and channel (can you reach your target audience?). Look at companies and people who have tried to solve it in the past (if any): why did they fail?
- Find your audience: Research where your ideal customers hang out online or offline. Use Reddit or niche forums to connect.
- Request interviews: Reach out without pitching your product. Focus on their experiences with the problem to get authentic feedback.
- Conduct interviews: Dive deep into their pain points, current solutions, and unmet needs. Key questions like "What emotions does this problem evoke?" or "What solutions have you tried?" can uncover invaluable insights.
- Assess feedback: Based on what you hear, decide whether to build confidently, pivot, or explore a new idea.
Now, the above is the gist of my guide to idea validation. Give it a full read to find out how to frame your idea, identify its risks, and know if you can move forward with confidently building a solution!
