The finding worth quoting
Across 745 scored problems, the median score is 71 out of 100, and only 109 reach 90 or above. That is 15% of everything we have published, or roughly one problem in 7.
The useful reading of that: most of what people complain about in public is real but survivable. They are annoyed, not stuck. The small band at the top is where someone describes a cost they are already paying, in money or hours, and that band is far narrower than the volume of complaint suggests.
It is also the argument against picking an idea from the loudest thread you happened to read. Volume of complaint and severity of complaint come apart, and only one of them is worth building against.
How the numbers are produced
Every published page starts from public Reddit discussions. Posts from a community are read, the ones describing the same underlying problem are grouped, and each group is scored from 0 to 100 on how acute, frequent and recent it is. The threads behind each group are kept and linked, which is why there are 4,719 of them: an average of 6.3 per problem.
Nothing here is generated from a model’s general knowledge. If a problem appears on this site, specific posts produced it, and those posts are one click away on the page that holds it.
The corpus currently covers 59 subreddits and 28 audience niches. It is Reddit-only. For B2B, SaaS, developer, ecommerce operations and professional-services audiences that is unusually rich source material. For consumer and visual categories that live on TikTok or Instagram, it is partial, and treating it as a complete picture of those markets would be a mistake.
What the score does and does not mean
The Pain Signal Score measures the strength of the evidence that a problem is real and recurring. It is not a market size estimate, not a revenue forecast, and not a judgement about whether a business built on that problem would work. A problem can score 92 and still be a bad business, because execution, reach and willingness to pay are not in the data.
Scores across the corpus currently run from 60 to 92. That floor is deliberate: groups scoring below it do not get published, because a weak pattern presented with a number attached is worse than no number at all.
Cite this
Free to use, quote and republish with a link back. No permission needed.
“Across 745 scored problems drawn from 18,669 Reddit posts, only 15% score 90 or above for severity, roughly one in 7.”
If you would like a figure this page does not cover, the underlying pages are all public and free to read.
Read the underlying data
- The full research database — all 87 pages, no signup
- Scored problems in r/shopify — one page in full, as an example
- The State of Reddit Pain Points — the patterns across communities, written up
- How this data is sourced — and what Reddit’s rules actually say