Guide
How to Find Customer Pain Points Before You Build
Find customer pain points by reading places where people already complain unprompted, such as forums, reviews, support tickets, and subreddits. Ask people about specific past moments of frustration rather than their general opinions. A real pain point is one someone is already (imperfectly) trying to solve.
A pain point is not an opinion
Asking "what frustrates you about X?" tends to produce a list of minor annoyances, because people will generate opinions on demand. A real pain point already has evidence attached to it: someone has complained about it unprompted, built a workaround for it, or paid for a worse solution because of it.
Where to look
- 1
Public forums and communities
Reddit threads, niche forums, and Discord/Slack communities where your target users already gather. Search for the problem, not your product category.
- 2
Reviews and support tickets of adjacent tools
One-star and two-star reviews of tools people currently use for this job are a goldmine of specific, worded-in-their-own-language frustration.
- 3
Interviews about a specific past event
"Tell me about the last time this went wrong" surfaces a real pain point with detail. "What annoys you about X" surfaces a generic complaint with none.
Signs it’s a real pain point, not a minor annoyance
- The same complaint shows up across multiple unrelated people or threads
- Someone has already built or bought an imperfect workaround for it
- It costs them time, money, or a failed outcome, rather than a mild inconvenience
- They bring it up unprompted, without you asking a leading question
How FirstSight helps
FirstSight runs the "search public discussion" step for you. It scours the web for people describing the problem you’re exploring and surfaces the pain points and existing workarounds it finds, with a clarity score showing how strong that pattern is. It then generates follow-up interview questions so you can confirm the pain point directly with real people.
Ready to move from guessing to evidence?