How to Find Startup Ideas on Reddit (Step-by-Step Playbook)

Every successful SaaS I've seen started the same way: somebody found a complaint on the internet and built a fix.

Reddit is the single best place to do this. Not because Reddit users are special - but because they complain in public, in detail, with context. Twitter gives you hot takes. Reddit gives you pain.

Here's the exact process I use to find ideas worth building.

Step 1: Find the right subreddits

You're not looking for r/startups or r/entrepreneur. Those are full of people who want to START things, not people who HAVE problems. Big difference.

You want subreddits where people do actual work:

• r/smallbusiness - owners venting about operations
• r/realtors - agents stuck in manual workflows
• r/bookkeeping - accountants drowning in client work
• r/veterinary - practice owners dealing with ancient software
• r/weddingplanning - coordinators managing chaos in spreadsheets
• r/ecommerce - sellers fighting with inventory and fulfillment

The more niche, the better. r/dogbreeding has 40K members and their software options are stuck in 2008. That's a goldmine.

Step 2: Search for pain language

Don't browse. Search. These queries surface real problems:

• "I wish there was"
• "is there a tool that"
• "I can't believe there's no"
• "I'm stuck using"
• "this is so frustrating"
• "does anyone have a solution for"
• "I've been doing this manually"

Each of these is someone begging for a product to exist. When you find a thread with 50+ upvotes on "I wish there was a tool that...", you've found validated demand. No surveys needed.

Step 3: Check if the problem is worth solving

Not every Reddit complaint is a business. Filter for these signals:

People are already paying for bad solutions. If someone says "I'm paying $200/month for [terrible tool] and it doesn't even do X" - that's perfect. They've already proven willingness to pay. You just need to not suck at X.

The problem is recurring. One-time problems don't make good SaaS businesses. You want problems that happen daily or weekly. "Every month I spend 6 hours reconciling invoices" = recurring pain = recurring revenue.

The people have money. This is brutal but true. Building for broke college students is hard mode. Building for real estate agents, dentists, accountants, or e-commerce sellers? They have budgets. They're used to paying for software.

Step 4: Validate with volume

One Reddit post isn't enough. You need to see the same complaint across multiple threads, multiple subreddits, and ideally multiple platforms.

Here's what I do:

1. Find a complaint on Reddit
2. Search the same keywords on Twitter/X
3. Check YouTube for tutorial videos (if people make tutorials working around a problem, the problem is real)
4. Search Google Trends to see if search interest is growing
5. Look at G2/Capterra reviews of existing tools - 1-star reviews are free market research

If the same pain shows up in 3+ places, you've got something real.

Step 5: Size the opportunity

This is where most people over-complicate things. You don't need a McKinsey market analysis. You need three numbers:

• How many people have this problem? (Subreddit size is a proxy. r/realtors has 100K members, but there are 1.5M+ realtors in the US alone.)
• What would they pay monthly? (Look at what existing tools charge. If competitors charge $30-100/mo, you can too.)
• What's a realistic conversion rate? (1-3% of people who see your product will convert. Be conservative.)

If 100K potential customers × $50/mo × 0.5% conversion = $25K MRR potential. That's more than enough for a solo founder.

The subreddits nobody is mining

Everyone looks at the obvious ones. Here are subreddits with real problems and almost no SaaS competition:

• r/PropertyManagement - landlords using spreadsheets to manage 5-20 units
• r/tradeschool and **r/electricians** - tradespeople managing scheduling with paper
• r/therapists - private practice owners drowning in admin
• r/veterinary - practice management software is prehistoric
• r/churning - people tracking complex reward strategies manually
• r/flipping - resellers with inventory chaos

The less "tech" the community feels, the bigger the opportunity. These people NEED software. They just don't have good options yet.

Common mistakes

Don't build what Redditors ask for. Build what they need. There's a difference. People will describe their dream feature set, and it's always over-engineered. Listen to the pain, not the proposed solution.

Don't lurk for months. You can do this entire process in a weekend. Spend Saturday searching, Sunday evaluating. By Monday, you should have 3-5 ideas worth exploring further.

Don't skip the boring ideas. "Scheduling tool for dog groomers" doesn't sound sexy. But dog groomers are busy, they have money, and their current tools are trash. That's a business. "AI-powered social media analytics" sounds sexy but you'll be competing with 500 funded startups.

The best startup ideas on Reddit aren't hiding. They're sitting there in plain text, with upvotes and comment threads confirming the demand. You just have to look where nobody else is looking.