Pain Point Mining: How to Find Business Ideas in Customer Frustrations

Jason Fried didn't set out to build a project management company.

In 2004, he was running a web design agency called 37signals. They kept missing deadlines, losing track of client feedback, and drowning in email threads. Existing project management tools were either too complex (Microsoft Project) or too simple (spreadsheets).

So they built something for themselves. A simple tool to manage their own projects.

Clients started asking about it. "What's that thing you use to track our project?" They released it publicly in 2004. Today, Basecamp has millions of users and has never taken venture capital.

Fried didn't start with "what business should I build?" He started with "this problem is driving me insane." That's pain point mining.

The Power of Frustration

The best startup ideas often come from the same pattern:

Reddit: Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were frustrated that there was no good way to find interesting content online. Digg existed, but it was too curated. They wanted a community-driven news source.

Notion: Ivan Zhao was frustrated that he needed 6 different tools to manage his work—notes, docs, wikis, tasks, databases. He built an all-in-one workspace.

Slack: Stewart Butterfield's gaming company was failing, but they'd built an internal chat tool that everyone loved. The game died. The frustration-solver became a $27 billion company.

None of these started with market research or TAM calculations. They started with genuine frustration.

Why Pain Points Beat Ideas

Most founders start with an idea: "What if there was an app that did X?"

Better founders start with a pain point: "This problem keeps happening. How can it be solved?"

The difference matters:

Starting Point	Risk	Validation Needed
Idea first	High—might be a solution looking for a problem	Must prove problem exists and people will pay
Pain first	Lower—problem already validated by frustration	Must prove your solution is better than alternatives

When you start with pain, you've already validated that the problem exists. People are experiencing it. They're complaining about it. They might be paying for bad solutions.

Your remaining job is to build something better. That's still hard. But it's easier than convincing people they have a problem they don't feel.

Where to Find Pain Points

People complain in predictable places:

Reddit is a goldmine. Every subreddit is a community of people with shared interests—and shared frustrations. r/startups, r/SaaS, r/smallbusiness, r/productivity, industry-specific subreddits. Search for "frustrated," "annoyed," "hate," "wish there was."

Hacker News is especially valuable for B2B and developer tools. The comments often contain detailed discussions about what's broken in existing solutions.

X (Twitter) threads where people vent about tools and processes.

G2 and Capterra reviews—especially 2-3 star reviews where people like the product category but hate specific implementations.

Customer support forums for existing products. What do people keep asking for?

Industry Slack communities and Discord servers where professionals discuss their workflows.

The common thread: anywhere people gather around a shared context, they'll discuss shared frustrations.

How Bedrock Reports's Pain Point Mining Works

We built Pain Point Mining to automate this discovery process. Here's how to use it:

Step 1: Choose Your Focus

When you open Pain Point Mining, you'll select:

Industries: SaaS, E-commerce, Fintech, Healthcare, Education, Real Estate, or custom. Pick industries where you have some context. You don't need to be an expert, but understanding the space helps you evaluate which pain points are real opportunities.

Target Customer: B2B, B2C, or both. This changes which communities we search and how we frame opportunities.

Problem Severity: From minor annoyances to critical pain. Higher severity usually means higher willingness to pay—but also fewer occurrences. Start with "Medium" for balance.

Existing Solutions: You can filter for only unsolved problems, or include problems with poor existing solutions. I recommend including "poorly solved" problems—they're often the best opportunities. Someone's already proven the market exists.

Step 2: Add Keywords (Optional)

If you have specific interests, add keywords:

• "scheduling" + "meetings"
• "invoicing" + "freelance"
• "inventory" + "restaurant"

This focuses the search. Without keywords, you'll get a broader landscape.

Step 3: Run and Wait

Click "Mine Pain Points." The system will:

1. Generate search queries based on your parameters
2. Scan Reddit, Hacker News, and other platforms
3. Find posts and comments expressing frustration
4. Cluster similar complaints into themes
5. Score each cluster by intensity and frequency
6. Generate business ideas for the top clusters

This takes 2-5 minutes depending on scope.

Understanding Your Results

Here's what a real result looks like (actual output from a recent session):

Cluster: "Client feedback is scattered across email, Slack, and random docs"

• Intensity Score: 7.4/10
• Frequency: Mentioned in 23 posts across 4 communities
• Current Workarounds: "We use a shared Google Doc but it's a mess" / "I screenshot everything into Notion" / "Honestly we just lose half of it"
• Sample Quote: "I spend 2 hours a week just hunting for feedback a client gave me 3 weeks ago. It's insane."

Generated Idea: "Client feedback aggregation tool that automatically captures and organizes feedback from email, Slack, and document comments into a searchable database with AI-generated summaries."

This is a starting point. The intensity score tells you how frustrated people are. The frequency tells you how common it is. The quotes give you language you can use in marketing.

But here's the thing: these numbers aren't gospel.

What the Results Don't Tell You

Pain Point Mining has real limitations. Being honest about them makes the tool more useful:

Selection bias: Reddit and HN skew toward tech-savvy, younger users. If your target market is 60-year-old accountants, their frustrations might not show up here.

Vocal minority: The people who complain online might not represent the broader market. Sometimes the loudest frustrations belong to edge cases, not mainstream users.

Willingness to pay: Just because people complain doesn't mean they'll pay to solve the problem. Some pain is tolerable. Some is annoying but not worth $50/month.

Timing: A pain point from 2023 might already have a solution you missed. Always verify with current research.

Context loss: Clusters aggregate complaints, but individual situations might be very different. A "scheduling frustration" in healthcare is different from one in construction.

Use Pain Point Mining as a discovery tool, not a decision tool. It finds candidates worth investigating. You still need to validate each candidate properly.

From Pain Point to Validated Idea

Finding a pain point is step one. Here's what comes next:

1. Verify the pain point with conversations

Don't trust Reddit alone. Talk to 10-15 people who experience this frustration. Ask:

• How often does this happen?
• What do you currently do about it?
• How much time/money does it cost you?
• What have you tried that didn't work?

If conversations confirm what you found in the data, you're onto something.

2. Check for existing solutions

Search thoroughly. Many problems that "have no solution" actually have solutions that people haven't found. Check:

• Google with various phrasings
• Product Hunt
• G2 and Capterra
• Y Combinator startup database
• Crunchbase

If good solutions exist, pivot to understanding why people aren't using them.

3. Assess your fit

Can you actually build this? Do you have:

• Technical ability (or a co-founder who does)
• Domain understanding
• A way to reach these customers
• Time to execute

A great pain point that doesn't match your skills is a great pain point for someone else.

4. Run a full validation

Once you've found a promising pain point, do proper validation: market sizing, competitor analysis, regulatory research, business model testing.

You can run a Bedrock Reports validation report to get comprehensive market intelligence. The combination of pain point discovery + validation report gives you a complete picture.

Example: A Pain Point Mining Session

Let me walk through a real session I ran recently:

Parameters:

• Industry: SaaS/Tech
• Target: B2B
• Severity: Medium-High
• Solutions: Poorly solved OK
• Keywords: "onboarding," "documentation"

Top Result:

Cluster: "Developer onboarding takes forever and docs are always out of date"

• Intensity: 8.1/10
• Frequency: 47 mentions across 6 communities
• Current solutions: "Notion wiki that nobody updates" / "Recorded Loom videos from 18 months ago" / "Shadow a senior dev for a week"
• Key quote: "Every new hire takes 3 weeks to get productive. We lose so much time."

This is a strong signal. High intensity, high frequency, existing solutions that clearly don't work.

But I need to verify: Is this a real buying decision? Would engineering managers pay for this? Is the problem actually unsolvable, or are there good tools people just don't know about?

Those questions lead to conversations and deeper research. The pain point mining just got me started.

Tips for Better Results

1. Run multiple searches

Don't do one search and stop. Try different parameters:

• Different industries
• B2B vs B2C
• Different severity levels
• Various keyword combinations

Each search reveals different opportunities.

2. Look for "I pay for X but wish it did Y"

These are gold. People are already paying for something in the category. They're not price-resistant. They just want a better version.

3. Combine with Founder-Market Fit

Bedrock Reports's Founder-Market Fit mode helps you find pain points that match your specific skills and background. The intersection of "validated pain" and "your unfair advantage" is where the best opportunities live.

4. Save and revisit

Not every pain point is right for you right now. Save interesting ones. Come back in 3 months. Sometimes timing changes, or you learn something that makes an old pain point suddenly relevant.

When Pain Point Mining Doesn't Work

This approach isn't for everyone:

Deep tech innovations often create markets rather than solving existing frustrations. Nobody was complaining about not having an iPhone in 2006.

Network effect businesses like social networks or marketplaces require different discovery approaches. The pain of "I don't have a professional network" is real, but it doesn't tell you how to build LinkedIn.

Highly regulated industries might have pain points that can't be solved without regulatory change. Healthcare is full of frustrations that startups can't touch.

For most software businesses, though, pain point mining is the right starting point. You're finding problems people actually have, rather than inventing problems you hope exist.

Keep Reading

• How to Validate a Business Idea — What to do after you find a pain point
• Founder-Market Fit — Find pain points that match your skills
• Trend Surfing — Discover ideas by riding emerging waves
• The Startup Validation Checklist — 15 questions to assess your discovered ideas

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Ready to discover validated problems? Start Pain Point Mining and find business ideas grounded in real customer frustrations.