How to Find Pain Points: A Practical Guide for Entrepreneurs in 2025

You’ve got an idea for a product. Maybe you’ve even started building it. But here’s the question that keeps entrepreneurs up at night: are you solving a problem people actually care about?

Learning how to find pain points is arguably the most critical skill for any entrepreneur or product builder. It’s the difference between creating something people tolerate and building something they can’t live without. Yet most founders skip this step entirely, jumping straight into solution mode without truly understanding the problems their customers face.

In this guide, you’ll discover practical, actionable methods to uncover real customer pain points that lead to validated business opportunities. Whether you’re exploring your first startup idea or looking to expand an existing product, these techniques will help you identify problems worth solving.

Why Finding Pain Points Matters More Than Your Solution

Before diving into the how, let’s address the why. Many entrepreneurs fall in love with their solutions before understanding the problem. This backwards approach leads to products nobody wants.

Pain points represent the gap between where your customers are and where they want to be. The intensity of this gap determines whether someone will pay for a solution. A mild inconvenience? They’ll live with it. A daily frustration that costs them time, money, or sanity? Now you’ve got something worth building.

The most successful products don’t just solve problems—they solve painful problems. Slack didn’t create a “better communication tool”; it eliminated the chaos of scattered conversations across emails, texts, and meetings. Uber didn’t build a “taxi alternative”; it solved the pain of unreliable transportation and opaque pricing.

Where to Look: The Best Sources for Discovering Pain Points

Finding pain points isn’t about guessing what frustrates people. It’s about going where real conversations happen and listening carefully.

Online Communities and Forums

Reddit, niche forums, and community platforms are goldmines for pain point discovery. People share their frustrations openly in these spaces, often with specific details about what’s not working in their lives or businesses.

Start by identifying subreddits or communities where your target audience hangs out. Search for keywords like “frustrated,” “annoying,” “waste of time,” “expensive,” or “difficult.” Look for recurring themes in complaints and questions.

The beauty of online communities is that you can observe patterns across hundreds or thousands of conversations. When multiple people independently describe the same problem, you’ve found something real.

Customer Support Channels and Reviews

If competitors exist in your space, their customer reviews and support tickets are incredibly revealing. Check app store reviews, G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, or industry-specific review sites.

Pay special attention to 2-star and 3-star reviews. Five-star reviews tell you what’s working; one-star reviews are often emotional rants. But those middle ratings? They reveal specific pain points that existing solutions don’t adequately address.

Direct Customer Conversations

Nothing beats talking directly to potential customers. Schedule 15-30 minute calls or coffee meetings with people in your target market. The goal isn’t to pitch your idea—it’s to understand their world.

Ask open-ended questions about their typical day, workflow, or challenges. What takes longer than it should? What feels unnecessarily complicated? Where do they feel stuck? Listen more than you talk, and dig deeper when something interesting surfaces.

Social Media Listening

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook groups are full of people venting about problems in real-time. Use search functions to find conversations around specific topics, industries, or tools.

Look for phrases like “I wish there was,” “Why is there no,” or “Does anyone know how to.” These signal unmet needs and frustrations that could represent opportunities.

What to Look For: Identifying High-Value Pain Points

Not all pain points are created equal. Some are worth building businesses around; others aren’t worth the effort. Here’s how to distinguish between them.

Frequency: How Often Does This Problem Occur?

A problem someone encounters once a year isn’t as valuable as one they face daily or weekly. High-frequency pain points create stronger demand for solutions because the frustration compounds over time.

Ask yourself: Is this a recurring issue or a one-time annoyance? Problems that happen repeatedly are more likely to drive purchasing decisions.

Intensity: How Much Does This Problem Hurt?

Some problems are mildly irritating. Others are deal-breakers that cost significant time, money, or opportunity. The more intense the pain, the more motivated people are to find and pay for a solution.

Look for emotional language in how people describe problems. Words like “nightmare,” “impossible,” “broken,” or “disaster” indicate high-intensity pain points.

Willingness to Pay: Do People Want This Fixed Enough to Open Their Wallets?

The ultimate test of a valuable pain point is whether people will pay to solve it. Some problems are frustrating but not financially painful enough to justify a purchase.

Evidence of willingness to pay includes people already using expensive alternatives, cobbling together DIY solutions, or explicitly saying they’d pay for something better. If they’re working around the problem for free, that’s a yellow flag.

Market Size: How Many People Have This Problem?

Even intense, frequent problems need a large enough audience to build a viable business. Niche problems can work if you’re building a specialized tool with premium pricing, but you need enough potential customers to sustain growth.

Research the size of communities discussing this problem. Are there thousands of people or just dozens? Both can work, but they require different business models.

How to Validate Pain Points Before Building Anything

Once you’ve identified potential pain points, resist the urge to immediately start coding or designing. Validation comes first.

The “Would You Pay?” Test

Create a simple landing page describing the solution to the pain point you’ve identified. Don’t build the product—just describe what it would do. Drive traffic to this page and see if people sign up for a waitlist or, even better, offer to pay for early access.

Real validation comes from commitment, not compliments. Someone saying “that’s a great idea” means nothing. Someone giving you their email or credit card? That’s signal.

Problem Interviews at Scale

Instead of asking people if they’d use your solution, focus your interviews entirely on understanding their current problems. Ask about their existing workflow, what they’ve tried before, and where things break down.

If the pain point is real, people will light up when discussing it. They’ll share war stories, show you screenshots of failed attempts, and ask when your solution will be ready. That enthusiasm validates you’re onto something.

Analyze Search Volume and Trends

Use tools like Google Trends, Answer the Public, or keyword research platforms to see if people are actively searching for solutions to this problem. High search volume indicates awareness and active seeking behavior.

Look at trend direction too. Is interest growing or declining? Growing pain points often signal emerging opportunities.

Leveraging Real Community Insights to Find Pain Points Faster

While traditional research methods work, they’re time-consuming. You need to manually read through thousands of posts, identify patterns, and score which pain points matter most. For entrepreneurs moving fast, this manual process can take weeks.

This is where analyzing structured community discussions becomes powerful. Instead of spending hours scrolling through Reddit threads, imagine having an AI-powered system that’s already analyzed thousands of conversations, identified recurring pain points, and ranked them by intensity and frequency.

PainOnSocial does exactly this for Reddit communities. It continuously monitors curated subreddits relevant to your target market, uses AI to identify and score pain points on a 0-100 scale, and surfaces real quotes with permalinks and upvote counts as evidence. Rather than guessing which problems matter, you see actual discussions from potential customers, ranked by how often they’re mentioned and how intensely people feel about them.

For example, if you’re exploring the productivity tools market, PainOnSocial might surface that “context switching between too many apps” scores 87/100 across relevant communities, with dozens of supporting quotes from real users. You can click through to read the full discussions, see the upvotes, and validate whether this pain point aligns with your vision—all without spending days on manual research.

Common Mistakes When Finding Pain Points

Even experienced entrepreneurs make these errors when researching customer problems:

Mistake #1: Confirming Your Bias

You have an idea, so you seek out evidence that validates it while ignoring contradictory signals. This confirmation bias kills products before they launch. Stay objective and let the data surprise you.

Mistake #2: Solving Hypothetical Problems

Just because something seems logical doesn’t mean it’s painful. “People should want to exercise more” is different from “people are actively frustrated with existing fitness apps.” Focus on expressed pain, not assumed pain.

Mistake #3: Listening to Loudest Voice, Not the Crowd

One vocal person complaining about something doesn’t validate a pain point. Look for patterns across multiple independent sources. Volume and consistency matter more than individual intensity.

Mistake #4: Ignoring Existing Solutions

If nobody’s tried to solve this problem before, that’s often a red flag, not an opportunity. Either the problem isn’t painful enough, or it’s technically impossible. Do your homework on what’s been attempted previously.

Turning Pain Points Into Product Ideas

Once you’ve identified and validated a pain point, you’re ready to design a solution. But remember: the pain point is what matters, not your specific solution to it.

Stay flexible on the “how” while remaining rigid on the “what.” Your initial solution idea might be wrong, but if you’ve correctly identified a real pain point, you can pivot your approach while staying focused on the problem.

Document everything you learn. Create a pain point database with quotes, sources, intensity scores, and frequency estimates. This becomes your north star as you build, helping you make tough decisions about features and priorities.

Key Takeaways: Your Action Plan for Finding Pain Points

Finding pain points isn’t rocket science, but it does require discipline and genuine curiosity about your customers’ lives. Here’s your action plan:

Start by immersing yourself in communities where your target customers gather. Spend time listening before jumping to solutions. Look for recurring themes in complaints, workarounds, and questions that keep appearing.

Evaluate potential pain points based on frequency, intensity, willingness to pay, and market size. Not every problem is worth solving, so focus on high-value opportunities.

Validate before building. Use landing pages, problem interviews, and search data to confirm people actually care about this problem enough to pay for a solution.

Stay objective and avoid common mistakes like confirmation bias or solving hypothetical problems. Let real customer frustrations guide your decisions, not your assumptions.

Remember: the best entrepreneurs don’t just build cool products. They solve painful problems that people are desperate to fix. Master the skill of finding those problems, and you’re halfway to building something people truly need.

Ready to discover what’s really frustrating your target customers? Start listening, start asking questions, and start validating. Your next great product idea is hiding in someone’s everyday frustration.