The best subreddits for finding startup ideas
Pick the wrong communities and you read memes for a weekend. Pick the right ones and the problems come faster than you can write them down.
Founder and entrepreneur hubs
Broad communities where people building businesses talk shop. Noisy, but a steady stream of “I wish a tool existed for this”:
- r/Entrepreneur — huge and general; mine the “what tools do you use” and “biggest headache” threads
- r/smallbusiness — owners of real, often offline businesses; one of the best for boring, payable problems
- r/startups — earlier-stage and product-minded; good for “how did you find your idea” threads
- r/SideProject — people shipping small things because they had a problem nobody solved
- r/EntrepreneurRideAlong — practical operators; strong for niche service-business pain
Complaint, rant, and frustration subs
Here the problem is the whole post. The emotion tells you how badly it hurts:
- r/mildlyinfuriating — small repeated annoyances; the upvotes tell you what resonates
- r/rant — unfiltered frustration; search your industry keyword and read what enrages people
- r/Frugal and r/personalfinance — money pain, which is the most payable pain there is
- Profession-specific vent threads inside larger subs — find the recurring “vent thread” and you have a problem list handed to you
Profession and industry subs
Where the underserved B2B money lives — people describe the exact tools and workflows of a specific job:
- r/marketing and r/PPC — campaign, reporting, and attribution pain
- r/sysadmin and r/msp — IT pros ranting about monitoring, ticketing, and reporting tools
- r/Accounting and r/Bookkeeping — repetitive, deadline-driven, budget-backed work
- r/RealEstate and r/realtors — tenant screening, listing management, client follow-up
- r/freelance and r/digitalnomad — invoicing, contracts, getting paid
- r/humanresources, r/recruiting — hiring and onboarding admin businesses pay to streamline
Product-wish and “take my money” subs
Communities that exist specifically for people to post problems and ask someone to build the fix:
- r/SomebodyMakeThis — people literally describing products they want
- r/AppIdeas — requested apps, with comments revealing demand and prior attempts
- r/Lightbulb and r/CrazyIdeas — raw idea dumps; filter hard, but occasional gems
Buyer and marketplace seller subs
Sellers on big platforms vent about the tools around those platforms — specific complaints, reachable buyers:
- r/Etsy — handmade and print sellers fighting listing, photo, and fee management
- r/FulfillmentByAmazon and r/AmazonSeller — inventory, repricing, and analytics pain with real budgets
- r/shopify and r/ecommerce — store operators duct-taping apps together; “is there an app that” posts
How to judge whether a subreddit is worth mining
- Activity over size — 50k subscribers with 30 posts a day beats 2M with a dead feed
- Complaint density — skim top posts of the year; if many describe problems or ask for tools, it’s fertile
- Do members have budgets? — match the community’s spending power to the product you want to build
- Self-promotion rules — some subs ban tool talk (so demand goes unmet); others have weekly tool threads that are gold
- Recency of pain — fresh complaints mean the problem is still live
How to discover more subreddits in any niche
The lists above are a starting point; the communities specific to your niche are where the least-contested ideas hide. Use Reddit search and r/findareddit, follow the “related communities” links in a sub’s sidebar, and use subreddit-overlap tools to find where your audience also gathers.
The most reliable method is to define exactly who has the problem, then ask where that person spends time. A wedding photographer is in r/WeddingPhotography, but also in r/smallbusiness and r/Entrepreneur wearing a different hat.
A subreddit is only half the job
Two founders can lurk the same community and one finds five ideas while the other finds nothing — because the first knew what to search.
The search phrases that signal demandFrequently asked questions
What is the single best subreddit for startup ideas?
There’s no universal winner — it depends on who you want to serve. For broad idea hunting, r/Entrepreneur and r/smallbusiness surface the most payable problems. For software, profession subs like r/sysadmin or r/Accounting are stronger. For raw requests, r/SomebodyMakeThis is the most direct. Match the community to your target customer rather than chasing the largest one.
Where do people post problems they want solved?
The most direct places are r/SomebodyMakeThis, r/AppIdeas, and r/Lightbulb, where the whole point is requesting products. Beyond those, profession and complaint subs are full of implied requests — a vent about a broken workflow is a problem statement in disguise. Search “is there a tool that” and “I wish there was an app for.”
How do I find niche subreddits for my industry?
Start with Reddit search and r/findareddit, then follow the related-communities links in the sidebar of any sub you use. Subreddit-overlap tools show where your audience also gathers. The most reliable method is to define who has the problem and ask where that person spends time online, then go find that community.
How big does a subreddit need to be to be useful?
Size matters less than activity and complaint density. A focused community of 30,000 active professionals can yield more ideas than a sprawling 2-million-member sub full of memes. Check whether real discussion happens weekly and whether members describe problems and budgets.
Are smaller subreddits better for finding ideas?
Often yes. Smaller niche subs are less picked-over by other founders, the pain is more specific, and the members are easier to reach later as customers. The tradeoff is volume. A good approach is to start in a large hub to learn the broad pains, then drill into niche subs for the least-contested opportunities.
Can I just use one subreddit, or should I track several?
Track several. A real problem shows up across multiple communities, and seeing the same complaint in three different subs is how you confirm it’s a market rather than one person’s quirk. Pick one broad hub and two or three niche or profession subs to start, then add more as you learn where your audience vents.
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Read →How to find startup ideas on Reddit
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