When I started looking for my next idea, I had no process.
I'd scroll Twitter, see something interesting, get excited, start building. Two months later — nobody cared.
The problem wasn't execution. It was that I had no way to tell the difference between "this sounds cool" and "people are actively frustrated by this right now and would pay to fix it."
So I got obsessive about it. Started reading hundreds of Reddit threads manually. r/indiehackers, r/SaaS, r/startups, niche subreddits. Looking for the posts where people weren't just complaining — they were describing a specific pain, asking if something existed, saying "I'd pay for this."
After a few weeks of doing this by hand I realized two things:
- The signal is real and it's everywhere
- There's no way a human can process it at the volume it exists
So I built a tool that does it automatically. It monitors founder communities, scores ideas against the signals that separate real demand from wishful thinking, and surfaces the ones worth looking at.
I've been running it for a few months now. The difference in how I evaluate ideas is night and day.
Happy to share what I look for if anyone wants to dig into the methodology — or you can try the tool directly and see what's trending in your niche right now.
What's your current process for filtering ideas before you start building?
Tool is xfoundry.dev — free to explore. Would love harsh feedback from this community specifically.