How it works: finding startup ideas on Reddit

Startup ideas from what people complain about today. Here is exactly how the daily list is produced, and how you can use the same method yourself.

1. Sources

Every day we read the public "top of the day" feeds of 19 problem-heavy subreddits across Personal Finance, Tech Support, Relationships, Careers, Health, Home & DIY, Small Business, Legal, Parenting, Productivity, Software. Only public data is used and every idea links back to its source threads.

2. Filtering for real problems

We keep posts that describe a problem or ask for help — "how do I…", "should I…", errors, struggles, requests for advice — and drop announcements, memes and celebrations.

3. Deduplication

Near-duplicate questions within a category are merged using TF-IDF cosine similarity plus a fuzzy title match, so the same problem asked several ways counts once, with more weight.

4. Ranking

Each post gets an engagement score (upvotes and comments where available, otherwise its position in the community's top-of-day list), decayed with a 24-hour half-life. A topic's score is the sum of its posts' scores × (1 + 0.25 × ln(number of posts)). Badges compare with the previous day: NEW, ▲ up, ▼ down. The list is published once a day around 6:00 AM IST.

5. Writing the idea

For problems with a clear market, we write an original business idea: target customer, model, how it makes money, a pricing guess (always labelled as an estimate), an MVP, three validation steps, known alternatives (only well-known real products) and risks. Personal, vague or crisis topics (medical or legal emergencies) get no idea.

6. Scores

Opportunity score (1–10) is an editorial judgement of demand, willingness to pay, competition and build effort. Signal score (1–10) is computed from data: 2/4/6 points for 1/2/3+ threads, +1 per extra day seen (max +2), and +2/+1/+0.5 for reaching the daily top 10/25/50.

7. Quotes

When the source threads contain short statements about price, cost or paying, we quote them verbatim (under 25 words), attributed and linked. We never invent or paraphrase quotes; if none exist, the section is left out.

8. Thin pages

Ideas backed by a single thread are published but marked noindex until the problem recurs, so search engines only index ideas with repeated evidence.

Do it yourself

Pick 3–5 communities where your target customers ask for help.
Read the top posts of the day and note every concrete problem.
Count repeats over two weeks — repetition beats upvotes.
Look for money words in comments: price, cost, paid, quote.
Check existing tools as a customer would, then talk to five people before building.