How to find good product ideas on Reddit

Most of the posts about finding viable business ideas on Reddit come down to:

1. Find a particular subreddit
2. Monitor for activity/discussions around a certain topic

What nobody tells you is how to do 2). What do you look for? What do you avoid? How do you NOT screw yourself up with building something nobody wants?

I'll try to answer all of those questions here.

1. Look for links inside subreddit comments

The theory: There are websites/SaaS/web tools that people in a particular niche consistently use. As a result, they often mention those tools in various discussions (usually in comments, because most Reddit mods forbid posting links).

For example, in the FIFA subreddit you'll find many mentions of FUTBin, a website where you can compare players, build squads, and so on.

FUTBin is actually a pretty popular website, according to SimilarWeb:

Another subreddit with plenty of links that 'veI analyzed was /r/entrepreneur. Here are some products I discovered there:

• FounderCafe, was mentioned here, here, here and on many other posts.

• PitchGround, was mentioned here and here

• Stylized.ai, mentioned here, and here

Analyze the popularity of the comments: Some of those comments might be self-promotional, but if they have a good amount of upvotes, it can be a sign that the community finds the tool to be useful:

Analyze the popularity of the tools: Does the tool that got mentioned in the subreddit has any traction? We can use SimilarWeb to find this out.

• For PitchGround, we can see it's already a popular platform about software lifetime deals.
• For Stylized.ai, we can see it's starting to gain some traction (it first started appearing on their ranking list on December 2022):

Look for mentions of popular products (then building extensions on top of them)

The theory: What popular products are people using in a niche? If you find such products, those products probably have an app store/app exchange or an API you can build on.

I found that building app extensions for popular platforms are a great way to get started as a bootstrapped founder because they usually handle the user acquisition part for you.

An example: While browsing through the most popular posts on /r/startups, I discovered this post on how LinkedIn works for B2B startups.

The keyword here is LinkedIn. The ecosystem of software tools around LinkedIn is huge. For example, if you type "linkedin auto post scheduling" into Google you'll find only 4 paid search results at the beginning (which is a clear sign of strong competition):

Now, most of these tools aren't optimized for startups (which are usually software-based). If you could create a LinkedIN tool specifically for software startups, that could potentially give you an edge.

Furthermore, you could use Reddit Ads and advertise your software tool at this specific subreddit audience.

Figure out ways to uutomate how-to posts

Many subreddits have 'how-to' posts with steps you can automate.

For example, in this post on dropshipping, the OP talks about how he uses videos to market his products. Many people agree that videos are a good way to get more sales as a dropshipper.

Product idea: A video ad spy tool for dropshippers. There are a few profitable video ad spy tools, but non of them specializes for dropshippers.

This is the trickiest approach to get started because there are so many product ideas you could get from how-to posts.

If you decide to use this approach, you should be available of one dangerous bias people have...

Beware of the recency bias

The recency bias is our tendency to weight current events more than earlier events.

Here's one example: Five years ago, net neutrality was a hot topic. If you take a look at the most upvoted posts on /r/entrepreneur, you'll find a post on net neutrality five years ago.

Now try looking other, similar (and popular) posts around net neutrality.

You'll find zero. Nil. Nada.

This is the recency bias in action.

How to avoid this bias: Look for multiple posts around the same topic. For example, on /r/entrepreneur, you'll see a lot of posts about business ideas.

This is a sign that finding good business ideas is recurring need that people have. So building a product to come up with good business ideas might not be a bad idea after all (no pun intended).

Hope you found this post to be useful!