HACKER Q&A
📣 throwawaynay

How to find problems to solve on social media?(to find business ideas)


I was wondering if you guys had good methods to find problems to solve on social media(I'm thinking reddit or twitter), i.e find people complaining about something that you could solve, preferably with software.

Out of the top of my head I'd try to search for things like:

"is there a way to ..."

"is there an app/website for..."

"how can I do that..."

But this is probably not optimal.

Do you have good methods/keywords/patterns to look for this kind of thing?

I'm thinking about finding the best ways to do that to create a website with real time fluxes of problems detected on social media with votes.

Once I have enough data, I could also maybe make a classifier to remove false positives.(and also maybe to identify problems without relying on simple keywords)

  👤 rozenmd Accepted Answer ✓
Pick an audience you want to serve, above all else.

Figure out where online they hang out.

Participate (don't sell!) in the conversation, and you'll see what people complain about (and the fixes others suggest).

👤 longnguyen
This is the exact book to help you with that (not affiliated) [0]

0: https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Entrepreneur-Build-Audience-...

👤 swah
What rozenmd said. And there's an alternative take: find something that people already pay for (existing market) and execute better there, stealing 1% of their users, etc.