How to find “Real” Problems worth building a SaaS for ?

Hey reddit,

Most failed MVPs didn’t die because of bad code, they died because the problem wasn’t painful enough, frequent enough, or valuable enough to justify a budget. People complain about stuff all the time. Doesn’t mean they’ll pay to fix it.

Here’s how to spot a real problem and validate this one:

Methods:

• Mass-scan Reddit to identify recurring complaints about a Topic or a Niche.
• Extract high-intent keywords from comments where Posts start with "I would pay for..." or "How is there no tool for...".
• Analyze sentiment and engagement across thousands from actual problems.
• See if the problem is growing or dying.

Success Metrics:

• 100+ unique users complaining about the exact same feature gap.
• Finding threads where users are actively looking for alternatives to $1B+ incumbents.
• The topics identified show consistent upvotes and long comment chains over the last 30 days.
• People are still looking for a solution despite existing tools on the market.

If you’re stuck in the idea phase, validating four bad ideas will teach you more than planning one “perfect” idea for months.

By the way, I’m currently building a small tool to automate this whole process—basically something that scans Reddit to help find and validate SaaS ideas by looking at real pain points.

It’s still in the early stages and I’m really looking for some honest feedback from other builders. If anyone is interested in testing it out, just let me know in the comments !