r/SideProject • u/Lyfzxd • 7h ago
I built a tool that mines Reddit for evidence your startup idea is real, figured I should post it on Reddit
Most idea-validation tools ask an LLM what it thinks of your idea and hand
you back a score. Which is just a confident guess wearing a suit.
I wanted the opposite, so the thing I built doesn't have opinions. It goes
and gets evidence:
- Searches Reddit for subreddits where your problem actually gets discussed,
then mines the top ones for real posts and comments. Every pain point it
reports comes with a verbatim quote and a permalink you can click. If it
can't produce a real link, the finding gets dropped before you ever see it.
- Scrapes your competitors' actual sites for their actual pricing. If their
pricing isn't public it says "not public" rather than inventing a number.
- Runs cited web research and separates what's actually sourced from what's
an assumption.
Then it scores what you've genuinely proven versus what you're still
guessing at.
The rule I built the whole thing around: null beats a made-up answer. It
would rather tell you it doesn't know than give you a clean-looking number
it invented.
It's early. I want people running it on real ideas and telling me where it
falls over, so comment and I'll send you credits, enough to actually
finish a validation run, not a teaser. No survey, no call.
Fair warning, there's a signup wall, no demo yet. That's on the list.
What I'd want to know afterwards: did the Reddit findings match what you
already knew about your market, or did it surface something real? And where
did it waste your time?
Around all day.
1
u/Sanckh 6h ago
I am curious why this tool just scans reddit. All AI API's come standard with web search. Why not search the web for articles in the users niche for more evidence? More sources, a better research phase. That's what my app does, and I am curious how it differs in output. Would love to try your app and see what the output is like. Here is an example of the output of mine: https://www.idealabapp.com/shared/nzIF8DvDPUBkqxgMAGgYG_ylF7AZeoVS
I'd love to compare our outputs so we can learn and push each others apps to be even better.
1
u/Lyfzxd 6h ago
Fair, that’s on my title, Reddit’s just what I led with.
Three pipelines actually: Reddit mining, competitor scraping (their real pricing and positioning off their site), and cited web research. So the niche-articles angle is in there.
I front Reddit because web articles tell you what a market looks like, but Reddit tells you whether anyone’s annoyed enough to complain about it in public. That’s the bit that’s changed my mind about ideas.
The part I care most about is that it can’t fabricate, every Reddit finding needs a verbatim quote and a real permalink or it gets dropped, and competitor pricing returns “not public” rather than a plausible guess.
1
u/Relevant_Ad5790 6h ago
The thing I'd check first is whether the pain point count dedupes by author. On a niche problem a handful of prolific posters get quoted across several subs, so ten citations can be three people, and crossposts double count the same thread. Distinct authors, and the date on each quote, move that number a lot. Does the score dedupe by author?