u/Kindly_Buy_7840

I’m building a platform to help founders find and validate real SaaS problems before they spend months building something.

The one thing I’m hung up on is the cold start.

If you were starting a platform like this, where would you go to get your first 10-50 high quality problems?

I don't want to make them up, nor do I want to just copy random complaints off the internet. I'm looking for real businesses with recurring problems they would pay to solve.

So far I've thought about:

• Reading Reddit Threads
• G2 and Capterra review walkthrough
• Direct talks with founders
• What do you ask people about their biggest work frustrations?
• Looking through SaaS and founder communities

But I'm sure I'm missing out on some great sources.

You’ve built a SaaS, done customer research or validated startup ideas before. Where do you typically see recurring customer pain points?

I’m not looking for startup ideas. I'm working on creating a repeatable process for identifying real problems.

Love to hear your thoughts on how you do it.

I'm building a platform where founders and product teams can discover and validate real SaaS problems before deciding what to build.

The challenge I'm thinking about is the cold start.

I don't want to launch with an empty database, but I also don't want to invent problems myself.

If you were starting from zero, how would you get the first 10–50 genuinely valuable problems?

Some ideas I've considered:

• Manually researching Reddit discussions
• Looking through G2/Capterra reviews
• Interviewing founders
• Asking people to submit their biggest work frustrations
• Collecting problems from online communities

If you've built a marketplace or community before, how did you solve this?

Where would you look first for high-quality, recurring business problems that founders would actually pay to solve?

I'm not looking for startup ideas—I want repeatable ways to find real customer pain points.

I'd appreciate any advice or examples from your own experience.

I'm building a platform where professionals validate which problems are actually worth solving—and I want to make sure I'm solving a real problem myself before writing any code.

The idea: founders waste months building solutions to problems that aren't painful enough or widespread enough. My platform would let professionals (marketers, designers, and SaaS operators) vote on curated problems with severity scores and willingness-to-pay signals—so founders can see ranked, validated pain points instead of guessing.

The twist vs. Product Hunt: instead of discovering products, you're discovering pain. And votes are weighted by the voter's portfolio and experience—a senior SEO agency owner's vote carries more signal than a student's vote.

Before I build anything, I want 3 honest answers from people here:

1. As a founder, have you ever built something only to discover the problem wasn't painful enough? What did that cost you?
2. If you could see a live leaderboard of "Top 10 most painful problems in marketing this week"—validated by working professionals—would that actually change how you decide what to build?
3. What would make you trust the scores? Is portfolio-weighted voting credible to you, or does it sound gimmicky?

Not pitching anything. No links. Just genuinely trying to find out if this is a problem worth solving before I make it my next 6 months.