Reddit Research Tools for Founders
Reddit is the best free complaint corpus on the internet, and most people search it wrong. The fix is mostly about phrasing.
Last updated 2026-08-17
Why category searches fail
Search Reddit for your product category and you get promotion, recommendation threads and people asking what to buy. All of that is downstream of the problem you want to find.
Search for the language people use when they are annoyed and you get the problem itself. 'I hate that', 'is there a tool for', 'doing this manually', 'we built our own' — these are the phrases that surface unmet need.
A workable process
- Start from complaint phrasing, not category nouns
- Sort by new rather than top — you want current friction, not a thread from 2019
- Read the comments rather than the post; the specific complaint is usually a reply
- Note what they use today, because the workaround is your real competitor
- Only count it once you have seen it from several unrelated people
Tooling
Reddit's official API is free within generous limits and is what our connector uses. Our free Reddit keyword generator produces the complaint-shaped phrases above for any topic, and they work equally well pasted into Reddit search or Google with a site: prefix.