1.3 Reading the Market Before Entering It
Most founders do market research wrong. They read industry reports, look at competitor websites, and convince themselves there’s a gap. That’s not research. That’s reading a menu and guessing what the food tastes like.
Real market signal lives in the places where frustrated people complain publicly. Your job is to find those places before you build anything.
Start with 1-star and 2-star reviews on your competitors’ products. Not 1-star reviews where someone says “it broke” or “bad customer service.” Those are noise. You want the 2-star reviews that say “it almost does what I need, but…” That sentence finishes with your product roadmap. The person leaving that review is telling you exactly what pain your competitor created but didn’t solve. They’re not angry enough to leave, but they’re disappointed enough to warn others. That’s your customer. That’s your angle.
The next place you go is Reddit. Not to post, not to promote, to listen. Search the subreddits where your target customer lives and filter by “new” or sort by “top” over the last month. You’re looking for posts that start with “I’ve been trying to…” or “Does anyone know how to…” or “Why is it so hard to…” Those are live pain signals from people actively suffering right now. Anish, who built Save Wise to $25,000 MRR, found his first real customers not through Product Hunt or Hacker News (both of which gave him 95-96% bounce rates and zero useful feedback) but inside the Rakuten Stacks Facebook group, where people were manually posting about stacking credit card offers. They were already organized around the pain. He just showed up where the pain was.
The most underrated signal of all is job postings. If a company is hiring a “Head of [X]” or a full team to do something manually, that means two things: the problem is real enough to budget for, and they haven’t found a software solution they trust yet. That’s confirmed pain with confirmed spend. Search LinkedIn Jobs or Indeed for roles that describe, in their job description, exactly the workflow you’re trying to automate. Read the responsibilities section. That’s the process your product needs to replace.
Joseph built Super Demo to $3,000,000 ARR by targeting exactly the pain buried in sales team job descriptions: the miserable, repetitive work of creating product demos that went out of date. He didn’t guess at the pain. The pain was being documented in hiring posts by companies trying to throw headcount at the problem.
You can do all three of these in one afternoon. Spend 45 minutes in competitor reviews on G2, Capterra, or the App Store depending on your category. Spend 45 minutes on Reddit and relevant forums searching for the specific words frustrated people use. Spend 30 minutes searching job boards for roles that describe your target workflow. By the end of that afternoon you should have a clear picture of what people are currently tolerating, what workarounds they’ve built, and where companies are spending money to manage a problem manually.
Write down the exact phrases people use to describe their pain. Not your paraphrase. Their words. That language becomes your homepage copy, your cold email subject lines, and your ad creative later.
Today’s action: pick one competitor with reviews on a public platform and read every 1-star and 2-star review posted in the last 12 months. Write down the three complaints that come up most often. That list is worth more than any market sizing report you’ll ever read.