Startup Ideas From Hacker News and GitHub: A Source-Based Research System

If you're a technical founder, Hacker News and GitHub are two of the best idea sources available.

They expose real implementation pain in public.

The mistake is reading them as news instead of market research.

Why these sources work

Hacker News gives you:

• Early discussion of technical shifts
• Repeated complaints around developer workflows
• High-context comments from practitioners

GitHub gives you:

• Issue threads with concrete pain
• Feature requests that products have not solved
• Workarounds teams are already using

Together, they reveal pain with real depth and language.

The extraction workflow

Step 1: Build a signal list

Track recurring phrases like:

• "This is still manual"
• "Why is this not built in"
• "We had to script around this"
• "Maintenance overhead is huge"

Step 2: Cluster by workflow

Group issues into:

• Deployment and release pain
• Data and integration pain
• Testing and quality pain
• Monitoring and incident response pain

Step 3: Add business filters

For each cluster ask:

• Who is the buyer?
• What is current spend?
• How frequent is this pain?
• Can a narrow MVP be shipped quickly?

Step 4: Select one focused wedge

Avoid broad "developer platform" ideas early.

Pick a narrow problem you can solve extremely well.

Example translation from source to product wedge

Raw GitHub signal:

• Multiple issues about poor migration visibility and rollback complexity.

Potential wedge:

• Deployment migration tracker with preflight checks and rollback guardrails.

Why it has potential:

• Frequent pain
• High downside when failures happen
• Clear B2B buyer in engineering teams

Ranking source-derived ideas

Use a scorecard:

• Complaint frequency
• Pain severity
• Team budget likelihood
• Competitive gap clarity
• Build feasibility

Only ship what scores highly across all five.

Funnel integration

Create dedicated SEO pages like:

• /hacker-news-startup-ideas
• /github-startup-ideas

Capture visitors into a daily idea newsletter, then convert power users to paid tools for deeper research, alerts, and execution.

This source-first approach compounds over time: more signals, better models, stronger SEO coverage, and higher-conviction product bets.