painpoint-finder

Describe the thing you want to build. Find out who actually has the problem, who already built it, and who you can talk to today.

You have an idea. Before you spend six months on it you want three answers: is this problem real, has somebody already solved it, and can I speak to one of these people this afternoon.

Type the idea in your own words. It searches five public sources, tells you how loud the problem actually is, pulls out the people already building it, and hands you a drafted opener for the ones worth talking to.

python find.py "i wanna build a tool that helps small restaurant owners manage their staff rotas"

That reads like an idea, not a problem.
  you asked : "i wanna build a tool that helps small restaurant owners manage their staff rotas"
  I searched: "helps small restaurant owners manage their staff rotas"

  People in pain do not use your words. They never write
  "I need an app for this" - they write the complaint. You
  will get better leads searching what THEY would type.

COVERAGE: PARTIAL
  searched github (100 posts)   searched hackernews (22 posts)
  searched reddit (194 posts)   searched web (10 posts)
  COULD NOT SEARCH stackexchange - too many requests from this IP

  Some sources could not be searched. Treat a low count as
  incomplete rather than as an answer.

==============================================================================
VERDICT: MODERATE signal
  12 of 316 posts matched (3.8%)
  match quality: 0.68 (4 recent enough to reply to)
  3.8% of posts matched. Enough to be worth a conversation.

  What the other posts are about instead:
      25  social media       10  landing pages
      13  love hear           9  online presence
      10  graphic design      9  cash flow
==============================================================================

3 ALREADY BUILDING THIS - your competition:

  [1] Issue #11 - [feat] Employee Module - assign and manage restaurant staff
      github Ashutosh-negi07/Plato - 10d ago
  [2] [Beta] FastQRMenu - looking for restaurant owners to test updating a menu
      reddit r/alphaandbetausers - 4d ago
  [3] Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) - SMS marketing for restaurants
      hackernews - 48mo ago

3 PERSON/PEOPLE you can reply to, best first:

[1] Restaurant owners/managers - curious how you handle scheduling
    reddit r/restaurant - 3h ago - by /u/Forsaken_Internet774

    --- draft reply (edit before sending) ---
    You said: "Restaurant owners/managers - curious how you handle scheduling
    I work at a restaurant, and our manager has mentioned how much of a
    headache it can be dealing with availability, schedule changes, and
    call-outs."

    Curious about one thing, and I'm asking rather than selling: how long had
    this been going on before it got bad enough to post about? And did
    anything you tried actually help?

That is a real run, not a mock-up.

What it does not claim

It does not know whether your idea is good. It knows how many people in five searchable places are describing your problem right now, and it shows you the arithmetic. MODERATE means 3.8% of what it read was about your thing — it does not mean go, and WEAK does not mean stop.

More importantly, it tells you what it could not see. If a source was rate-limited it says COULD NOT SEARCH, never no results, because those two look identical and mean opposite things. A tool that quietly reported silence from a search it never ran would talk someone out of a real idea, and that is the worst thing this could do.

The coverage line is not a disclaimer. It is the most important line in the output.

Why it rewrites your query

Searching an idea verbatim finds other builders, because they are the only people who use a builder's words. Measured: the query "i wanna build a startup that helps students find internships" returned two people asking what to build next — matched on the words "wanna" and "build" — and a feature request on somebody's intern-hackathon repo. Three leads, zero sufferers, and a WEAK verdict that would have talked someone out of a real idea.

The tool now searches the problem inside the idea, and says so:

That reads like an idea, not a problem.
  you asked : "i wanna build a tool that helps small restaurant owners manage their staff rotas"
  I searched: "helps small restaurant owners manage their staff rotas"

  People in pain do not use your words. They never write
  "I need an app for this" - they write the complaint. You
  will get better leads searching what THEY would type.

It deliberately does not claim to have understood you. Stripping "i wanna build a tool that" is honest string work; turning a feature back into a complaint is not, so it tells you to do that part yourself.

Who is already building it

The same search that finds your customers finds your competitors, because they post about the same problem in the same places. Handing you those under the heading "people you can reply to" wastes the slot — and offering to draft one a sympathetic "how long has this been going on?" is an embarrassing thing to send someone who is selling the cure.

They get their own section, printed before the leads, because a reader who has started drafting replies has stopped deciding:

4 ALREADY BUILDING THIS - your competition:

  [1] Issue #11 - [feat] Employee Module - assign and manage restaurant staff
      github Ashutosh-negi07/Plato - 10d ago
  [2] [Beta] FastQRMenu - looking for restaurant owners to test updating a menu
      reddit r/alphaandbetausers - 4d ago
  [3] If you already know restaurant owners, I'm testing a 30% recurring affiliate
      reddit r/passive_income - 4d ago
  [4] Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) - SMS marketing for restaurants
      hackernews - 48mo ago

  Not leads, and not nothing. Read what they built and what people say back
  to them - that is the fastest free research you will get. If several exist
  and none has taken the market, the interesting question is why.

If every match is a builder, the verdict says so in those words — "no customers found, only rivals" — rather than the misleading "nothing recent enough to reply to". The space is not quiet. It is taken.

Detection is deliberately narrow: a plain bug report stays a lead, because someone whose tool is broken is genuinely in pain.

Why it exists

I had a startup idea, built a prototype in an afternoon, then spent four days gathering 992 real posts about the problem. Seven of them were about my idea. Two hundred and eighty-four were about something else entirely.

That killed the idea in four days instead of six months, and it was the most useful thing I did all week.

But I still could not talk to anyone. My question post was auto-removed on a karma filter. The Slack community would not finish registering me. LinkedIn is closed to under-16s. Four days of perfect data, zero conversations.

Finding the pain is solved. Reaching the person is not. That gap is what this tool is for.

Install

git clone https://github.com/gokulsai1004-create/painpoint-finder.git
cd painpoint-finder
pip install requests fastembed   # fastembed optional, improves ranking
python find.py "your problem, in your own words"

Python 3.9+. One required dependency. No API key, no account, no sign-up — every source is public and anonymous.

If python runs Python 2 on your machine, use python3. On Windows, py -3 also works. If pip is missing, try python -m pip.

First run with fastembed installed downloads a ~50MB model once, which takes a minute. Every run after that is offline. Skip it entirely with --no-semantic if you would rather not.

What it searches

GitHub issues are worth calling out. A forum complaint is someone annoyed; a filed issue is someone who installed the thing, hit the wall, and cared enough to write it down against the project. The gap between what a tool does and what someone needed is sitting in the open.

Industries outside tech

Reddit, Hacker News and GitHub all skew heavily toward software, so early versions gave a developer hundreds of posts and a nurse or a plant engineer a coverage warning. Their complaints exist. They are just not on Hacker News.

Stack Exchange fixes most of that. It runs 365 sites on one API, and this searches eight of them chosen for breadth rather than volume — The Workplace above all, which is client, manager, colleague and scope problems across every industry at once.

The difference is not subtle. Searching "nurses burnout understaffed hospital shifts" returned nothing usable before and now surfaces "How to convince management that our department is understaffed" — a real person with the exact problem.

Still thin for genuinely niche B2B: heavy industry, defence procurement, specialist manufacturing. Those complaints live in trade publications and tender documents, and no source here reads those yet. The tool says so rather than guessing — see the coverage line.

Ranking

Optional but recommended:

pip install fastembed

Keyword matching finds posts containing your words. It cannot tell that a post about a care client refusing to wear dentures is not about a client refusing to pay an invoice — both contain "client" and "refuses". A small model running on your own machine can, because it places text by meaning.

Measured against this tool's own false positives, for the query "freelance client refuses to pay for revisions":

No key, no account, no network after the first run. Skipped automatically if fastembed is not installed, or explicitly with --no-semantic.

The ideas it is built on

A blocked search is not an empty search. If Reddit rate-limits us, the tool says COULD NOT SEARCH, never no results. Those two things look identical and mean opposite things, and confusing them would let this tool tell someone their real problem is imaginary. That distinction lives in the type system, not in a comment.

The ratio is the answer, not the count. Seven matches sounds promising until you learn it was seven out of nine hundred and sixty-three. The verdict prints before the leads for that reason.

A competitor is not a customer. Someone launching the thing you were going to launch posts about the same problem in the same places. They are separated out and never drafted a reply, because the finding "three people already shipped this" changes your next move more than one more complaint would.

A page is not a person. A Reddit thread has an author who can answer you; a blog post does not. Results are split, and pages explicitly get no draft reply — writing an opener for an article nobody reads would be theatre.

Caching

Rate limits are what you actually hit while refining a query: you rerun a search five times adjusting the wording, and the fifth gets refused. When a source is blocked, results from a recent identical search are used instead — and always labelled:

COVERAGE: MEDIUM (PARTLY CACHED)
  reddit: CACHED from 12 minutes ago (194 posts) - live search was refused

Cached runs mark the verdict line too. A stale answer presented as fresh is worse than no answer. Failures are never cached, and an ERROR never falls back — only a rate limit does, because an error might mean the source changed shape and serving old data would hide a real break.

What it will not do

It never sends anything. It surfaces a handful of leads and drafts something you must read, edit and post yourself. No bulk, no automation, no auto-posting. The version that sends fifty messages is a spam cannon; the version that helps you write one good reply is useful. That is a design constraint, not a missing feature, and it is not coming.

Known limitation: negation

Neither ranking mode can represent negation. not getting paid and getting paid are opposite problems, and both approaches treat them as nearly the same thing. Keywords reduce them to identical terms. Embeddings are worse than you would expect here — measured, the model rates "getting paid for extra work" as the closest match to "not getting paid for extra work", at 0.906, higher than any other candidate tested. That is a documented weakness of the technique, not a bug in this tool.

So the warning stays. When your query contains a negation the tool says so and suggests rephrasing positively: unpaid revisions works far better than not paid for revisions.

Adding a source

A source takes a query and returns a Result. That is the whole contract:

from . import OK, BLOCKED, Post, Result, register

def search(query, limit=100):
    ...
    return Result("mysource", OK, posts=[...], searched=n)

register("mysource", search)

Return BLOCKED if you could not look, ERROR if something broke, OK with an empty list if you looked and found nothing. Getting that right is the only thing the rest of the tool depends on.

Sources worth adding: app-store reviews, G2/Capterra, Upwork job posts (someone paying to fix a problem is the strongest signal there is), and SBIR solicitations for anything defence or government adjacent.

Tests

python test_painpoint.py

47 tests, all offline — a test that needs Reddit to be up is a test that fails for reasons that are not bugs.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.