How to Find Pain Points on Reddit: What 6,468 Posts Show

What counts as a pain point on Reddit?

A pain point is a problem that keeps coming back, from different people, and costs them time or money. One angry post is a vent. The same problem described by ten different people in a month, in their own words, is a pain point you can build for.

That definition matters because it tells you what to look for. You are not hunting for the loudest complaint. You are hunting for repetition. If you want the longer version, with the four types of pain and twenty scored examples, read our guide to customer pain points.

Step 1: Where do your customers talk on Reddit?

Start with the communities your customers use, not the ones founders use. If you are building for Shopify store owners, r/shopify and r/ecommerce matter more than r/startups. Pick 2 to 5 communities. Fewer and you miss the pattern; more and you drown in reading.

Size is less useful than activity. A community with a million members and a few posts a day tells you less than a smaller one where people post their problems every day. Every subreddit shows its weekly visitors and weekly contributions; the second number is the one that matters for research. Our subreddit stats tool shows both for any community.

Step 2: Which posts should you read first?

Read the questions first. This is the part we can show with data, and it goes against the most common advice.

What we measured

IdeaFast groups Reddit posts about the same underlying problem, scores each group from 0 to 100, and keeps the posts behind every score as receipts. We took 1,103 of those evidence posts from 23 subreddits, and compared their titles with 5,365 other posts from the same 23 subreddits in 2026. For each signal below, we counted how many titles had it in each group. We only call a difference real when it is large enough not to be chance at these sample sizes.

Questions beat complaints

Half of the posts that turned into evidence for a real pain point were questions. People who have a problem they cannot solve tend to ask about it: how do you handle this, is there a way to do that, does anyone else deal with this. A question is someone telling you the problem is still open. That is exactly what you want to find.

Venting words are a weak signal

The most repeated tip for Reddit research is to search for "I hate", "frustrated" or "I wish". In our data those words appeared in only 2.3% of pain-point titles, and not reliably more often than in any other post. Venting is common and mostly about a bad day, a bad client or a bad week. It rarely marks a problem that many people share. Search for how people ask, not how they vent.

Skip launches and revenue posts

Launch posts ("I built", "check out my") were 3.5 times less likely to be pain-point evidence, and revenue or MRR stories were a little over half as likely. Founder communities are full of both. They tell you what other people are building, not what customers need, so filter them out before you start counting.

Step 3: How many repeats make a real pain point?

Count people, not posts or upvotes. The same person posting twice is one data point. A popular post is one data point too, however many upvotes it has. What you want is the same problem described by different people, in different words, over a few weeks.

1. 1Group by the underlying problem, not the words. "Chargebacks are killing me" and "how do I fight a dispute" are the same problem.
2. 2Look for at least three different people before you take a pain seriously, and more in a big community.
3. 3Note what they have already tried. A spreadsheet, a hack or a paid tool they dislike means the pain is real enough to spend effort on.
4. 4Write down their exact words. They become your landing page copy and your search keywords later.

This is the step IdeaFast automates. It reads a few hundred recent posts from a community, groups the ones about the same problem, and gives each group a Pain Signal Score based on how acute, frequent and recent it is. Every problem links back to the threads behind it.

Step 4: Is it recent, and does it cost them something?

A problem that was loud two years ago may be solved now. Sort by new, or by top of the past month, and check the pain is still being posted. Then look for cost: hours spent every week, money spent on a workaround, clients lost, a tool they pay for and hate. A recent pain that costs people time or money is the one worth building for.

What real pain-point posts look like

These are real titles from the evidence behind our research pages. Notice the shape: most are questions, and none are launches.

What should I do? I created a awesome product it went viral and people started selling counterfeits.

Anyone else worried about maintaining an AI-built app long-term?

How Do You Actually Get Your First 1,000 Website Visitors Without Ads?

How does Google re-evaluate a website after a traffic drop?

What B2B marketing advice did you follow for way too long before realizing it wasn't working?

Each of these sits inside a scored problem on its research page, next to the other posts that describe the same thing: e-commerce, no-code, blogging, SEO and B2B marketing.

Search phrases that find pain points

Use Reddit's own search inside one subreddit at a time, sorted by new or by top of the past month. Based on the signals above, search the way people ask, not the way they vent:

• "how do you" plus the task: how do you track inventory, how do you chase invoices
• "is there a way" or "is there a tool"
• "anyone else" plus the problem
• "looking for" or "need" plus the job to be done
• "what do you use for" plus the task

Searching Google with site:reddit.com works for a first look but mixes every community together and favours old, popular threads. We explain why in our guide to startup market research on Reddit.

Tools that find pain points on Reddit

You can do all of this by hand. It takes a few hours per community. If you do it often, a tool saves that time. Prices below were read from each tool's own site on 21 September 2026.

F5Bot is an alert tool rather than a research tool: it tells you when a word appears, not which problems repeat. For the full side-by-side of the two research tools, see IdeaFast vs PainOnSocial, and for alert tools, our Reddit monitoring comparison.

What this data does not tell you

• It measures titles only. A post with a plain title can still hide a real pain in its body.
• Evidence was chosen by our own pipeline, which groups posts by meaning and scores the groups. A different method could pick different posts.
• It covers 23 subreddits, mostly founder, marketing, e-commerce and no-code communities, in 2026. Other communities may behave differently.
• These are signals, not rules. Half of pain-point posts were not questions. Use the signals to decide what to read first, then read.

Frequently asked questions