I've been spending the last few months doing something simple — reading Reddit and HN threads where people describe problems they're actively experiencing. Not trends. Not market reports. Just real complaints.

I track these daily, score them by how painful and frequent they are, and catalog them. I've collected over 1,500 so far.

Here are 5 from this week that stood out.

1. Accounting Workflow Automation Accountants in public firms keep posting about drowning in manual data entry, reconciliation, and report generation. The burnout is real. Existing tools integrate poorly with each other. There's room for something focused and simple that just automates the repetitive stuff.

2. Indexing Analysis Tool SEO professionals are constantly asking why their pages aren't being indexed by Google. There are tools that tell you what IS indexed but almost nothing that diagnoses WHY something isn't. This comes up weekly across multiple subreddits.

3. WordPress Malware Scanner WordPress sites getting hit through plugin vulnerabilities is a recurring nightmare. Site owners want something lightweight that scans in real time and actually removes the malicious code instead of just flagging it. Existing solutions are either bloated or expensive.

4. SaaS Early Adopter Marketplace This one hits close to home. Every founder knows the hardest part isn't building — it's finding those first 10-20 users who genuinely engage and give honest feedback. A simple marketplace connecting founders with early adopters would solve a pain I've felt myself.

5. Virtual Wedding Style Board Brides want a way to upload dress, hair, and color references into one visual board to see how everything looks together before committing. Sounds niche but the demand is surprisingly consistent and the market spends money.

All of these could be built as focused products by a solo developer.

I've been cataloging these through a project I built called SaasNiche (saasniche.com) — it scans Reddit for validated pain points organized by niche. Happy to share more for any specific niche if anyone's curious.

What would you build from this list? Anyone working on something similar?

Writing Code Was Never the Job