Every idea that’s gone anywhere started as someone complaining about something that already exists. You don’t need a lightning bolt moment, you need to know where people are already venting and how to read it properly.
This is the method, the exact search terms, and the prompt that turns a pile of Reddit complaints into 4 or 5 actual problems worth solving.
Before you start
What you need: a Claude account with Cowork (it’s Claude with a browser built in, so it can go and read Reddit itself instead of you copying and pasting threads).
What it costs: nothing extra if you’re already on a paid plan. Cowork needs a paid plan, Claude on the free plan can’t browse for you.
How long: 15 to 20 minutes for your first run.
Why complaints, not brainstorms
A brainstorm is a guess. A complaint is a fact. Someone typing “I wish there was something that” at 11pm has already tried to solve the problem themselves and failed, which means they’d pay for the fix. Your job is not to invent the idea, it’s to go find the ones already sitting in public, written by the people who’d buy them.
Step 1: Search the exact words
Don’t search a topic. Search frustration. These phrases catch people mid-vent, not people writing a calm review:
"I wish there was something that"
"why does no one make"
"is there an app that"
"I'm so sick of"
"does anyone else hate"
"I'd pay good money for"Run each one through Reddit’s own search, or Google with site:reddit.com in front of it, inside a subreddit that matches an industry or hobby you actually know something about. Knowing the space is what lets you tell a real problem from a one-off whinge.
Step 2: Filter out the noise
Most complaints are just people letting off steam. The ones worth your time are where someone is already paying for something that doesn’t work properly. That’s the filter. A free thing being annoying is a Tuesday. A paid thing failing is a business.
Step 3: Run the Cowork prompt
Once you’ve found a subreddit worth mining properly, don’t read every thread yourself. Open Cowork and give it this, swapping in your subreddit:
Go to r/[subreddit] and read through the posts and comments from the last 3 months. I'm looking for genuine complaints, not casual comments, specifically:
- People saying they wish a tool or service existed that doesn't
- People saying they're already paying for something and it doesn't work properly
- The same complaint showing up more than once from different people
Pull out every complaint you find with a link to the post. Then group them into 4 or 5 actual problems (not a list of a hundred separate whinges), and for each one tell me:
1. What the problem actually is, in one line
2. Roughly how often it comes up
3. Whether people mention already paying for a broken fix
Don't suggest solutions yet, just show me the problems.What comes back is a short list of real, repeated problems instead of a wall of individual comments. That’s the raw material. The solution is a separate step, and it’s the one where your own experience in the space actually matters.
You’ll know it worked when you get back 4 or 5 grouped problems, each with links to the posts, not a raw list of a hundred comments.
Step 4: Pick one
Once you’ve got 4 or 5 grouped problems, run each one against these before you get attached to it:
- Does it come up more than once, from different people?
- Is someone already paying for a broken version of the fix?
- Could you actually build or arrange a fix for it, given what you know?
If the answer to all three is yes, that’s your idea. If it’s a no on the third one, it’s still useful, it’s just not yours to build.
The final check
- Picked a subreddit you actually understand
- Ran at least 3 of the search phrases through it
- Ran the Cowork prompt on the last 3 months of posts
- Got back 4 or 5 grouped problems, not a raw list
- Checked each one against the three questions in Step 4
If something looks different
Cowork can’t access Reddit or the page looks broken. Reddit occasionally blocks automated browsing. Try again in a new session, or paste in a handful of thread URLs directly and ask Claude to read those instead.
Everything it finds is vague. Narrow the subreddit. A broad one like r/smallbusiness returns noise, a specific one like r/plumbing or r/dogtraining returns something you can actually act on.
Nothing repeats. That’s a real result, not a failure. It means that subreddit doesn’t have a shared pain point right now. Try a different one rather than forcing a pattern that isn’t there.