Stop guessing what to build
Mine validated pain from real online complaints
Pain Spotter uses AI to scan thousands of real discussions across Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt and Stack Exchange, extracts the pain points, and scores each one 0–100 on pain intensity, willingness to pay and feasibility. You just build the high scorers.
5,682
Discussions Analyzed
5
Platforms
60
Channels Monitored
17,505
Opportunities Discovered
Last updated
Find yourself below, see how it helps
If you're any of these, Pain Spotter was built for you.
Indie Hackers
Solo builders · Side-project devs
Find your next side project starting from a problem that's already validated.
- Skip hundreds of hours of reading Reddit / HN
- Every idea ships with MVP scope + landing-page copy
- Filter by ease-to-build for weekend-sized wins
Founders
0→1 stage · First-time & repeat
Pick your lane from real willingness-to-pay, not gut feel.
- 0–100 scores quantify pain & willingness to pay
- GTM launch plan + a why-this-might-fail reality check
- One-click opportunity → report / PRD (Business)
Product Managers
PM · Growth · Market research
Track emerging pain in your niche before everyone else does.
- Weekly trending board — spot trends 2–4 weeks before HN
- Cross-platform Theme view for the full landscape
- AI summary on every topic — get up to speed in 3 min
Not sure if it's you? Browse the first 10 opportunities free →
What is Pain Spotter?
Pain Spotter is an AI research tool for indie hackers, founders and product teams. It continuously scans Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt and Stack Exchange discussions, then uses LLMs to extract real user pain points and rank them as business opportunities on a 0–100 score combining pain intensity, willingness to pay, technical feasibility and long-term sustainability. Instead of guessing what to build next, you start from problems people are already begging to have solved.
More than searching Reddit for you
Reading threads by hand only surfaces single posts; we cluster the whole web into actionable, comparable opportunities.
Multi-Source Validated
Cross-referenced across Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt and Stack Exchange — not just one platform.
AI-Scored 0–100
Each opportunity ranked by pain intensity, willingness to pay, tech feasibility, and sustainability.
10 topic hubs + weekly trending
Jump straight into the niche that fits your stack; the trending board shows the fastest-growing pain on the web in real time.
AI synthesis on every topic
Each topic and theme hub ships with an LLM-generated 350-word brief — read the landscape in 3 minutes instead of 3 hours of reading threads.
Built for builders & privacy-safe: MCP & REST API pull opportunities straight into Cursor / Claude Desktop; all user identities are pseudonymized, no PII stored, no cross-site tracking (GDPR).
What's Heating Up Across Communities
Cross-source clusters of related pain points — these are the trends with strong signals across multiple channels right now.
How It Works
From raw community chatter to a ranked, validated opportunity in three steps.
Monitor Multiple Platforms
We continuously collect posts, comments, and discussions from Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Stack Exchange and other open communities.
AI Analysis
Our LLM analyzes pain points, payment signals, competitors, and technical feasibility across hundreds of comments.
Score & Rank
Each opportunity receives a 0-100 composite score. Build what ranks highest — it's already validated by real users.
Built for Builders
Skip the dashboard. Pull opportunities directly into your IDE via our MCP server, or query our REST API to feed your idea pipeline.
Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about how Pain Spotter works.
What is Pain Spotter and who is it for?+
Pain Spotter is an AI tool that scans Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Stack Exchange and other communities to extract real user pain points and rank them as scored business opportunities. It is built for indie hackers, product managers and founders who want to start from validated problems instead of guessing what to build.
Where does the data come from?+
We continuously collect public posts and comments from Reddit subreddits, Hacker News, Product Hunt and Stack Exchange via their public APIs. We never scrape private content, never store raw user identities (all author IDs are salted-hashed), and never republish original posts verbatim — only AI-rewritten summaries.
How are the 0–100 opportunity scores calculated?+
Each opportunity is scored along four axes by an LLM: pain intensity, willingness to pay, technical feasibility (inverted as difficulty), and long-term sustainability. The final 0–100 score is a weighted composite. Scores are recomputed whenever the source post is re-analyzed.
Is Pain Spotter free?+
Yes. Anyone can browse the first 10 opportunities for free without an account. A Pro plan ($20/month) unlocks the full ranked list, detailed pain narratives, MVP plans, and competitor analysis; the Business plan ($50/month) adds the Opportunity → Report & PRD generator. Stripe handles billing; you can cancel anytime from the customer portal.
How is this different from just searching Reddit myself?+
Manually reading subreddits surfaces individual posts; Pain Spotter clusters thousands of discussions across channels into ranked themes, extracts the underlying pain narrative, estimates willingness to pay, and shows MVP scope for the top 2 weeks of build work. You get the same insight in minutes that would otherwise take days of reading.
Do you respect user privacy and GDPR?+
Yes. All Reddit usernames are irreversibly hashed before storage (PII salted SHA-256), no personal data is retained, and we expose only AI-rewritten aggregated insights. You can contact support@painspotter.ai for any privacy request.
Can I access opportunities programmatically?+
Yes. Pro users get a REST API key and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server endpoint that plugs directly into Cursor, Claude Desktop or any MCP-aware IDE. Pull the ranked opportunity feed into your own idea pipeline.