New AI tools launch every week. Demos look impressive. Tweets go viral.

And yet, most of these startups quietly fade without anyone really caring that they’re gone.

That’s not because the builders were bad. It’s because they optimized for what was buildable, not what was painful.

AI makes it dangerously easy to mistake possibility for demand. You can automate almost anything, but very few things actually create urgency.

Investors sense this immediately. Users do too, even if they can’t articulate it.

The AI startups that survive don’t feel clever. They feel relieving. They remove work people already hate doing.

They fix processes teams complain about without being asked. They show up where pressure already exists.

Once I started filtering ideas through that lens, the landscape looked very different.

I began collecting repeated complaints from public forums and founder communities, places where people vent, not pitch.

Over time, that became startupideasdbcom a way to separate noise from signal before committing months of effort.

Sharing this because many smart founders aren’t failing, they’re just solving problems no one urgently wants solved.

If you had to be honest:

what problem do people around you complain about without you bringing it up?