u/thewhitelynx

Hey folks!

I'm experimenting with a new idea and would love to use it to help my fellow hustlers. Market research is a PITA.

Being an eng - I am of course automating the research.

Give me these (and any other specific you can) and I'll generate a free report for you to either post here or DM:
- Who is the customer you want to understand?
- What question, pain, or buying moment should the research start from?
- Any specific subreddits you want to search?
- Are there any competitors or alternatives you want to investigate?

All I ask is I'd love your feedback if the report is helpful.

I'm trying to understand my targetI feel lost on reddit grasping for straws in niche communities looking for clear pain points.

Does anyone else struggle with this? What're the best techniques for using Reddit effectively to:

1. Find real, solvable problems for niche communities
2. How do you tell real pain from casual complaining?
3. Reach out / post on these communities for validation and eventually feedback on product
4. Do you ever reach out to posters/commenters for validation? If so, how do you do it without being spammy?

Would love concrete workflows, search techniques, examples, or mistakes to avoid.

Being an eng - I of course tried automating the research and generated this report by trying to use AI to thoughtfully scrape reddit. Similar report for ADHD founder problems. Not a product (idk if there's really a market here) - but curious if it looks like it's getting the right information and would be worth open-sourcing.

This is a maybe a dumb question, but I don't think I'm alone.

I've worked in big tech for awhile now and have been trying to build 'side hustles' or 'startup's for ages.

I'm tired of trying to build the next big SaaS company.

I just wanna create real value / product in the world. Maybe a bakery? Maybe a copper mine? Or a grocery store?

So many of us are working on creating 'value' by building software to try to make marketing, sales, project management, software dev, ops, accounting, etc. better with the newest, shiniest thing.

I think more of us need to just go build something real.

So how do I give up my fancy tech job to go build a sucessful SMB?

I built a prototype for a customer research tool for early stage founders / side hustles. The problem is that its hard to discover clear customer pain with evidence, understand their current alternatives, and collect user leads.

The tool takes in your who (ICP), what (hypothesis / problem domains of interest), where (optional subreddits) and generates a detailed report for you.

I’m trying to figure out whether this is actually useful for founders/product teams, or if it feels like another shallow AI summary tool.

My goal is to save founders hours of hunting on reddit in exchange for a few bucks. I'm thinking something like $5/1 report or $10/3 reports.

Would anyone be willing to take a quick look and give blunt feedback?

Main questions:

1. Is the report format useful?
2. Would you trust this kind of research if the sources are linked?
3. What would make it more actionable?
4. Is the content actually useful? How would you change it?

Here are some example reports I generated:
For Founders trying to do customer research: http://bucket.dottl.xyz/customer-research-founders#report
For ADHD founders: http://bucket.dottl.xyz/adhd-founders#report
Legal SDR: http://bucket.dottl.xyz/legal-software-sdr.html#report

I think there's a lot of room for improvement - so I'd really appreciate the feedback!

I'm trying to figure out what kind of company to build and I feel lost on reddit grasping for straws in niche communities looking for pain points I can collect and address.

Does anyone else struggle with this? What're the best techniques for using Reddit effectively to:

1. Find real, solvable problems for niche communities
2. How do you tell real pain from casual complaining?
3. Reach out / post on these communities for validation and eventually feedback on product
4. Do you ever reach out to posters/commenters for validation? If so, how do you do it without being spammy?

Would love concrete workflows, search techniques, examples, or mistakes to avoid.

Also would love to know who else struggles with this! There may be some interesting product play here. I feel like Reddit is needlessly hard to do research with..

I've worked the last decade in big tech while trying my hand at a few startups - but I've not been very successful at it. Mostly building solutions without sufficient demand or customer validation.

Would be ideal to partner with someone who's got some experience launching a successful business who'd like a partner to help with building.

Is there a good way to find such folks?

Virtually no psychiatrist will prescribe me any stimulants due to my bipolar disorder. Stimulants can trigger mania. Preferably looking for off the shelf options.

I drink coffee and take bupropion for depression - both of which have some positive effect, but I still struggle with focus a lot, motivation.

What has worked for others in this situation?

YC's startup school seems pretty good if you wanna do a full-time VC-backed startup, but I'm really just looking for someone else who wants to put 10-20h/week into a sidehustle. Ideal partner would be someone who has experience with a painful problem with demand and is looking for someone with strong technical experience (can provide LinkedIn / resume for reference).

What're the best platforms for this?

As a technical founder, I've always felt drawn to technical products. My first startup was an AI coding assistant in 2019, but very few people were even willing to pay $20 for a developer tool - and the AI wasn't there yet to make it even 10% as powerful as it is today.

Companies like braintrust seem really interesting and sorta simple - there's OSS alternatives for LLM observability, one could just host and whitelable something like a Langfuse.

AI micro payments, virtual filesystems for multi-agents, cheap long-living always-available agent hosting - all seem like interesting ideas that sorta-maybe solve compelling problems.

Buuuut I also feel like devs reach for OSS so readily that building a succesful business in the technical infra space is just incredibly difficult.

How'd you validate your market? How'd you succeed when there are OSS alternatives to your product?

I feel like I'm perpetually stuck trying to find 'the right problem'.

A major problem I have is that I seem to be most drawn to what I feel like are the 'wrong problems' or 'wrong audiences'.

I.e. problems that are too broad or which have a saturated solution space and customer segments that often have a lower willingness to pay.

Examples:

- productivity / project management

- founder operating systems

- AI assistants / agents

- ADHD-ish execution tools

- knowledge management / second brain stuff

- mental health / coaching-adjacent products

Right now, I'm building my own sort of 'AI Life OS'-type tool. It makes it easy for me to track projects, tasks, notes, habits - with Codex working in the background to help me organize, come up with ideas, complete tasks, etc.

I feel like there's really interesting things here - full coding agent with access to your 'life context' to help you be your best self - but then I'm also struggling with clearly defining my problems, finding evidence of customer demand, and I feel like the demos that are maybe the best target audience often have a lower willingness to pay (e.g. ADHD founders).

Not sure if I should keep building here because if I can build a better tool for me then (1) improves my life and (2) can maybe improve others then. Or should I try to find some other target market and less competitive problems... Or should I look for common problems with crappy solutions? Or just problems with people who have lots of money to throw at solutions?

"Not Just Me and My To-Do List": Understanding Challenges of Task Management for Adults with ADHD and the Need for Augmented Social Scaffolds

The parts that stood out to me were:

1. Task management is often not just “make a better list.” The hardest part can be starting, switching, recovering after falling behind, or dealing with shame/overwhelm.
2. Rigid plans can backfire. A plan made during a high-energy moment can become unrealistic later, then the missed plan creates guilt and avoidance.
3. Social scaffolding seems important. Things like body doubling, check-ins, or just feeling like someone is “with you” can help more than a normal reminder.
4. Tools can become another form of avoidance. Organizing the app or list can feel productive while the actual task still does not get started.

What actually helps you start tasks, recover after missed plans, or keep a realistic plan without turning it into another stressful system?

Also, what do productivity apps usually get wrong for you

Like the title says; how do I do customer research effectively?

It feels like it should be easy- but I feel like it's incredibly hard to actually go from talking to strangers on Reddit to getting valuable insights that translate into concrete problems I can solve.

Either the problems are vague or aren't solveable by me or very diverse.

Maybe I'm going to broad without targetting specific enough customer bases or asking too broad of questions?

Part of the challenge is I feel drawn towards apps that should have broad appeal.

Right now, I'm building an AI personal project manager (I will not link) - the problem I am trying to solve is "I have tons of ideas and go too many directions and seem to never actually reach my target goal of being a succesful entrepreneuer" - so I am trying to engineer a solution lol. A good project manager I feel like can be really good at narrowing scope and working backwards from goal to current state and defining and driving the path from A to B.

As the title says.

For me - I'm an engineer and so I think I fall into a few common anti-patterns:
- I am prone to build first, validate after

- I like to build platforms and marketplaces ahead of demand

Advice I'd give myself now:
- Validate the market. If no one is posting or confirming that your problem is a painful issue, take that as signal to pivot.
- Use your own product regularly. If you don't even use it and find it *very* helpful - then why would your customers?

See title. I pay $200/month for Codex or Claude depending on the month. Why? The coding productivity gain is easily worth it.

What problems would you or do you pay $100 or more (single seat) to solve? Why?

Some things I would or do pay this much for:

- Therapy
- Coding tools
- Market research - specifically understanding my potential or actual customer's problems deeply
- Customer acquisition
...

See title. I pay $200/month for Codex or Claude depending on the month. Why? The coding productivity gain is easily worth it.

What problems would you or do you pay $100 or more (single seat) to solve? Why?

Some things I would or do pay this much for:

- Therapy
- Coding tools
- Market research - specifically understanding my potential or actual customer's problems deeply
- Customer acquisition
...

See title. I pay $200/month for Codex or Claude depending on the month. Why? The coding productivity gain is easily worth it.

What problems would you or do you pay $100 or more (single seat) to solve? Why?

Some things I would or do pay this much for:

- Therapy
- Coding tools
- Market research - specifically understanding my potential or actual customer's problems deeply
- Customer acquisition
...

See title. I pay $200/month for Codex or Claude depending on the month. Why? The coding productivity gain is easily worth it.

What problems would you or do you pay $100 or more (single seat) to solve? Why?

Some things I would or do pay this much for:

- Therapy
- Coding tools
- Market research - specifically understanding my potential or actual customer's problems deeply
- Customer acquisition
...

true or false?

Now, domain expertise, distribution, and marketing matter more than ever before. Building software has become (relatively) easy for vast majority of applications.

Is a non-technical person going to compete with Google search? no. Can they build small, successful SaaS apps on their own? definitely yes.

As a technical founder, I'd love for someone to steel man the argument. How do technical founders thrive in 2026?

I wanna build a specialized search for Reddit for my personal use that allows me to scan reddit more efficiently for user problems for my app.

Does reddit have APIs to support this?

I’m especially curious how other solo founders / indie hackers handle this.

I often have a bunch of plausible ideas, todos, product directions, customer research threads, and half-started projects. The hard part isn’t generating ideas; it’s deciding what deserves attention today and not reopening the whole strategy every time I sit down.

How do you currently turn messy thinking into actual execution?

Specifically:

- Where do your ideas/tasks usually pile up?

- What makes you lose focus?

- What system, if any, has actually helped?

- What still breaks even when you use that system?