Founders Have No Reliable Method to Confirm Demand Before Building
Creators struggle to differentiate between interesting ideas and those that solve genuine user frustrations. This leads to wasted time and effort building products nobody wants, highlighting a lack of structured validation processes. The core pain is a lack of reliable feedback and a clear path to identifying truly valuable problems.
SOURCES (60)
“Agreed. Starts with listening, and the answer is often learned helplessness producing soloing and frustration.”
“Honestly the most reliable market research method ever invented, being annoyed enough to fix it yourself”
“Wanted to come back and give this community some credit. About 18 months ago I was scrolling through ideas here, mostly just looking for interesting problems people wished someone would solve. One of them stuck with me because I had the same problem. I have several credit cards, all with different rewards, categories and offers, and I was constantly standing somewhere about to pay thinking, which card am I supposed to use here? The idea was pretty simple. What if your phone already knew where yo”
“Wanted to come back and give this community some credit. About 18 months ago I was scrolling through ideas here, mostly just looking for interesting problems people wished someone would solve. One of them stuck with me because I had the same problem. I have several credit cards, all with different rewards, categories and offers, and I was constantly standing somewhere about to pay thinking, which card am I supposed to use here? The idea was pretty simple. What if your phone already knew where yo”
Constantly. I tell every brand I work with to brief the next batch of creative before the current winner gets tired, and then I catch myself running my own best post into…
“Yeah, I feel like a lot of defaults age like that. Whatever made sense for the first users rarely gets revisited once it's everyone's problem”
“the trap is thinking you have enough context to make those decisions at all. you're basically decorating a room nobody's walked into yet”
“I still think polishing before launch has some value you just need a point where you stop touching things that nobody has complained about yet”
“The five you listed aren't equally adjacent. Stoicism and philosophy learning are subjects, and subject searches get served content: quote apps, courses. Someone typing that wanted to read, so an app that argues back is a weird result for them. Argument practice and critical thinking are activities, and there an app that debates you is the literal answer to the query. Duolingo ranks for learn spanish, nobody there ever chased linguistics. AI conversations I would drop from the list entirely,”
“curious whether you've thought about nudging voters to create their own event right on the results page. if thats your top of funnel, reducing friction there by even one click probably matters more than anything else you could build”
“That’s a really useful way to frame it. The ‘which 20,000 people already have words for this problem?’ question is probably more useful for me than asking how to make more people aware of a philosophy app. For The Agora, I’ve been thinking too broadly in terms of ‘people interested in philosophy.’ A better segment might be people already searching for things like how to think more critically, how to apply philosophy to real decisions, how to understand Nietzsche or Stoicism beyond quotes, or how”
“Yeah, I think that’s the part I’ve been approaching backwards. I’ve been thinking about how to market ‘philosophy debates’ as a category instead of identifying the frustration someone already has before they even know an app like mine exists. For The Agora, that pain might be things like feeling like philosophy is too passive, struggling to actually apply what they read, wanting to think more clearly, or wanting someone to challenge their ideas instead of just consuming more content. I really li”
“yeah most people would just quietly pivot the messaging and never mention the failed test”
“the 'pull the sentence where they describe the workaround' is a better version of what i've been doing, i was reading those threads for the pain and skipping what they do about it. the people who gave up on a tool are the interesting ones, that's basically a churn story with a name attached.”
“Hey! yes, I have been trying to find the right facebook groups where I could find my target users in US but couldn't find any group where people are having active conversation or posting in general, most groups are dead.”
“people dont search for categories they dont know exist but they absolutely search for the problem every day. forget the App Store for a minute and look at where your users are already venting about the pain point. Reddit threads, TikTok comments, Twitter rants. thats your keyword research. build content around the exact language they use to describe the frustration, not the solution you built. if you catch them at the moment of pain instead of the moment of purchase you dont need category awaren”
“I've abandoned enough side projects to accept the ideas were the problem, not the execution. So I built something that reads complaints instead of generating them. It pulls public complaints from eight places Reddit, HN, GitHub, Stack Exchange, Trustpilot, app stores, forums, X throws away the noise, and scores what's left for whether anyone would actually pay. 942 have made it through. The hard part was deduplication. Every "startup ideas" tool I tried would show me one loud R”
“I'm looking for a tool that helps me with pain and demand discovery on reddit and other social media. What exists and at what price? submitted by /u/Outrageous_Stick468 [link] [comments]”
“thats the part i had backwards for a long time. i went the other way, pulled 19 names out of 3400 posts and wrote to all of them. not one replied. they never said they had the problem, i decided it for them. the people who message you already named it themselves, thats the whole difference”
“yeah thats a good distinction, the intent behind each post probably filters the audience before they even hit send”
“I’ve been sketching out little comic panels on napkins for ages where the punchline is just someone screaming at their phone to stop being useless. This sounds like the thing they’d actually listen to. The read-aloud for PDFs is what caught my eye, most apps that claim to do it either butcher the formatting or just give up halfway through. Does it handle scanned docs or only text-based ones? That’s usually the breaking point for me, I’ll load up a 40-page contract and it’ll just stare back at me”
“I kind of need people to give me their opinions. Plus, I’m based in the US, and I know there are experts in this field, and subreddit. I had the pleasure of talking to one of them a few days ago, but I totally understand how these kinds of people are, they’re probably going to ghost us lol. I’m not asking for the key to the golden throne, I swear 😂. I just want to get some expertise and guidance on it. submitted by /u/worlddigitalai [link] [comments]”
“I think you may mean this as before you've done anything. Telepathy. Foreknowledge. ...And EASY button. You find demand because people have problems, spent money to solve them, and still came up short. You find demand everywhere. It's the failure to recognize demand keep you from finding it. I just watch television. One day a news program talks about a Japanese problem of advanced aging and finding health care workers who must often support a person's whole weight. Back strain is a p”
“Start with a problem you have. Then research and talk to others if they had the problem and how they tried to solve it. If they are still dissatisfied then you can start to experiment with solutions. Keep talking to uses before you build anything that way you don’t build something nobody wants or will pay for. Start reading as many startup basics book you can like Lean Startup. Reading helped accelerate when I went though this phase. Go get em.”
“I'm gonna try this next, focusing on people complaining about the problem. It's a niche thing but hopefully I'll find some.”
“What was the single bottleneck that came up the most across the people who messaged you? When ten people reach out from one post, eight of them are usually stuck on the exact same step.”
“i keep one note per complaint i keep running into and dont touch it until the same thing shows up three separate times. most of mine never got there.”
“It can be frustrating yes. As a one man IT for 140 users spread over 5 companies I try to do it right. Uses/teamlead said... But. I just want it to work ! But they do not want to make any effort or take any responsibility... No they shove it right to IT. Even when things are not really it and you explain everything thing. There is always the situation/ context. I understand for it support and small issues they are right.. I just fix it so they can go on with work. But more complex stuff needs co”
“The bit I would want to know: did the messages come off the posts where you explained something specific, or off the ones where you offered to help? Those two probably pull completely different people, and most of us are guessing at it rather than knowing. Which of your posts actually produced them?”
“Oh I felt this in my soul. Currently battling this right now. Like how hard is it to define the problem...”
“I am planning to build an ios app that helps gamify the process in a healthier manner”
“it's resistance, and it will never go away. You just gotta do the work, that's the only fix, in fact you searching for a solution is coping in a way. Honestly if you don't like to work, plan something fun afterward so you have a good reason to work first. This is what most will agree with”
“How can we tell you what's good or bad without even seeing it? 😅 At least drop the link 🔗, so we can it out and tell 🗣️ you what you should improve or work on.”
“Because maybe the general idea is not that bad. Just the execution is poor so far. Also paying a $20 for every little habit you want to change is not a good seller.. people won't even pay $20 for AI subscription.”
“My family keeps sending me screenshots of AI generated arguments against building new data centers. Apparently we have too many and they don't understand where the demand is coming from. When I asked how many we'll need over the next 10 years the answer was simple, we'll need to build exactly "Oh, fuck off." data centers in the US over the next 10 years to meet expected demand. We should get on that.I guess video games are a problem too. And social media. They wrote about it on their Facebook Gr”
“Great that you are excited and happy, but without knowing what it actually does or who it's for, there's not much to respond to here. What problem does it solve, and who's it built for?”
“the people everyone here says to talk to, i find them by reading new posts in a few subs every morning and noting whoever describes the problem out loud.”
“Find five people who already complain about the problem you solve. Not people who might need it someday. People who are actively frustrated. Answer their questions where they already hang out. That is distribution when you have no budget. Everything else is noise until you have those first users talking about you.”
“yeah, that spike-then-flatline pattern is brutal. i run a small directory too and what helped me was giving people a reason to check back that wasn't just 'fix something.' for your case, maybe a weekly 'newest confirmed spot' feed or a leaderboard of top contributors? also, if you ever want a permanent dofollow backlink for nanitch, i use launchpact.io/startups — $19 one-time, no review queue, and it gets indexed fast. ymmv but worth a look.”
“Three from one week is impressive work honestly. The structure I kept seeing was: post the result, then post about the response to that post, then post the "here's what I learned from posting" version. Each one gets a fresh audience and none of them require anything new to have actually happened.”
"I'll try" and ghosted. Happened more than once. I did about 20 posts into rooms where my people supposedly are with nothing in return. The one thing that worked for me this…
“take your passion or industry experience and solve ONE pain point that evident, try and help 3-5 people for free to get validation and ask for referrals or testimonials, rinse and repeat”
“That’s exactly the part I was most worried about too. A stream of “technically relevant” posts is almost worse than having no system at all. I’m handling it as a filtering problem rather than a keyword-matching problem. A signal first has to fit the GTM plan and product context, then Leadlyr checks the actual conversation/context and only promotes the ones that look worth acting on. The research step is also there partly to kill false positives before they reach you. And for now I’m deliberately”
“Make it one thought and one question and drop the pitch entirely at first. I usually just ask how they handle the problem today and shut up. If they bite then I say im building a thing and ask if they want to see it. It gets less weird after like 50 messages.”
“I wouldn’t try to find the “perfect niche” first. I’d find a problem. Pick a group of people you can actually get access to and start talking to them. Ask what wastes their time, costs them money or constantly pisses them off. If you hear the same problem 5 or 10 times, there’s somewhere to start. Then try solving it for one person before building a whole business around it. When you’ve got little experience, your advantage is you can test heaps of things without having much to lose. Don’t spend”
“mind if I suggest an improvement to your flow? just run a youtube live (or any other platform)... let it become a live Q/A where everyone can benefit from everyone else's questions I know I'd jump into it straight away”
“go where they already ask the question instead of reaching them cold. im not in my users network either. i just answer in a few subs every day.”
“you're not insane, you're just solving the actual problem which is getting people to stop bugging you the conversion test result would bug me too. means half the stuff we obsess over might not matter as much as we think for the small scale stuff i draw the line at anything that needs to exist in 2 years, otherwise it's all fair game”
“Friends will agree the problem is real and still never open the link. That's not validation. The useful move is to stop sending a link and sit next to one of them for ten minutes while they try it, or book a 15 minute call and watch. If they won't give you that, they were being polite. I'd treat the household use as the real proof and go find five strangers with the same pain. People you know are the worst first users because they don't want to hurt your feelings by saying no.”