Pain Points by Industry: How to Identify Customer Problems in 2025

Every industry has its unique challenges, but understanding pain points by industry is what separates successful entrepreneurs from those who struggle to find product-market fit. Whether you’re launching a SaaS platform, opening an ecommerce store, or disrupting healthcare, knowing the specific problems your target customers face is the foundation of building something people actually want.

The challenge? Pain points vary dramatically across industries. What keeps a B2B software buyer awake at night is completely different from what frustrates a retail consumer or healthcare provider. Generic market research won’t cut it—you need industry-specific insights backed by real customer conversations and validated frustrations.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the most common pain points by industry, how to identify them effectively, and practical frameworks for turning these insights into winning products and services.

Why Industry-Specific Pain Points Matter

Before diving into specific industries, let’s understand why this matters. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of assuming pain points are universal or that they can apply one-size-fits-all solutions across markets. This approach rarely works.

Industry-specific pain points matter because:

• Regulatory environments differ: Healthcare and finance face compliance requirements that don’t exist in retail or entertainment
• Buying processes vary: Enterprise SaaS has long sales cycles with multiple stakeholders, while ecommerce is often impulse-driven
• Customer expectations are unique: B2B customers prioritize ROI and integration, while B2C customers want convenience and experience
• Competition intensity differs: Saturated markets require solving problems better, while emerging markets need education

Understanding these nuances helps you craft solutions that resonate deeply with your specific audience rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

Common Pain Points in SaaS and Technology

The SaaS and technology sector is one of the most competitive industries for entrepreneurs. Common pain points by industry in this space include:

Integration Nightmares

Companies use an average of 110 SaaS applications, and making them work together is a constant frustration. Customers struggle with data silos, duplicate entry, and workflows that break across platforms. If your SaaS doesn’t integrate smoothly with existing tools, it’s dead on arrival.

Onboarding Complexity

Users expect to see value within minutes, not weeks. Complex setup processes, unclear documentation, and steep learning curves cause massive churn. The pain point isn’t just technical—it’s the opportunity cost of time spent learning your tool instead of doing actual work.

Pricing Transparency and Predictability

Hidden fees, usage-based pricing that spirals out of control, and confusing tier structures frustrate both individual users and procurement teams. Customers want to know exactly what they’ll pay and what they’ll get.

Customer Support Responsiveness

When something breaks in a business-critical tool, waiting 24 hours for email support isn’t acceptable. Real-time support, comprehensive self-service resources, and proactive monitoring are table stakes.

Ecommerce and Retail Pain Points

The ecommerce landscape has evolved dramatically, creating new pain points by industry that entrepreneurs must address:

Cart Abandonment and Checkout Friction

Nearly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned before purchase. Complex checkout processes, unexpected shipping costs, security concerns, and forced account creation all contribute to this massive pain point. Every additional step costs you conversions.

Product Discovery and Search

Customers know what they want but can’t find it on your site. Poor search functionality, inadequate filtering options, and irrelevant recommendations lead to frustration and bounces. The pain intensifies with larger catalogs.

Shipping Speed and Transparency

Amazon has trained customers to expect fast, free shipping with real-time tracking. Smaller retailers struggle to compete, and vague delivery estimates (“5-7 business days”) feel like an eternity in 2025.

Returns and Refund Complexity

The easier you make returns, the more confident customers feel buying. Complex return policies, restocking fees, and lengthy refund processes create anxiety that prevents purchases in the first place.

Healthcare and MedTech Pain Points

Healthcare presents unique pain points by industry due to regulatory requirements and high stakes:

Administrative Burden

Healthcare providers spend more time on paperwork than patient care. Insurance verification, prior authorizations, billing complexity, and compliance documentation consume resources and create burnout.

Interoperability Between Systems

Patient data lives in fragmented systems that don’t communicate. EHRs, lab systems, imaging platforms, and billing software operate in silos, forcing manual data transfer and creating patient safety risks.

Patient Engagement and Compliance

Getting patients to follow treatment plans, attend appointments, and take medications consistently is an uphill battle. Traditional communication methods fail, and patients feel disconnected from their care teams.

Cost Transparency

Patients rarely know what healthcare services will cost until they receive a bill weeks later. This unpredictability creates anxiety and distrust, and it’s a massive barrier to care access.

Financial Services Pain Points

Fintech entrepreneurs need to understand pain points by industry in banking and finance:

Security vs. Convenience Trade-offs

Customers want both ironclad security and frictionless access. Multi-factor authentication, password complexity requirements, and security questions create friction, but any breach destroys trust completely.

Fee Structures and Hidden Costs

Monthly maintenance fees, ATM fees, overdraft charges, foreign transaction fees—traditional banking nickel-and-dimes customers. Transparency around fees is a major pain point that neobanks have successfully addressed.

Access to Credit and Lending Speed

Traditional loan approval processes take weeks and require extensive documentation. Small businesses and individuals with non-traditional credit histories struggle to access capital when they need it most.

Financial Literacy and Guidance

Most people don’t understand financial products well enough to make informed decisions. They want personalized guidance without paying for expensive advisors or feeling patronized by generic content.

How to Research Pain Points in Your Industry

Understanding common pain points by industry is just the starting point. You need to validate which problems your specific target customers actually experience. Here’s a practical framework:

1. Listen Where Your Customers Already Talk

Don’t rely solely on surveys or interviews. People behave differently when asked directly versus when they’re venting frustrations organically. Monitor industry forums, Reddit communities, LinkedIn groups, and review sites to hear unfiltered complaints.

2. Analyze Support Tickets and Customer Feedback

If you already have customers, your support tickets are a goldmine. What issues come up repeatedly? What causes cancellations? What features do people request most often? This data reveals real pain points, not hypothetical ones.

3. Study Your Competitors’ Weak Points

Read competitor reviews, especially the 1-3 star ratings. What do customers complain about? Where do existing solutions fall short? These gaps represent opportunities for differentiation.

4. Conduct Problem-Focused Interviews

When you do talk to potential customers, focus on their current problems rather than pitching your solution. Ask about their workflows, what slows them down, what tools they’ve tried and abandoned, and what workarounds they use.

Leveraging Reddit for Industry Pain Point Discovery

Reddit has emerged as one of the most valuable platforms for understanding authentic pain points by industry. Unlike sanitized market research reports or carefully crafted survey responses, Reddit discussions reveal raw, unfiltered frustrations from real users in context.

The platform’s structure creates an ideal environment for pain point research. Industry-specific subreddits gather people facing similar challenges, and the upvoting system naturally surfaces the most resonant problems. When hundreds of people upvote a complaint or join a discussion thread, you’re seeing validated demand signals.

This is where PainOnSocial becomes particularly powerful for entrepreneurs researching pain points by industry. Rather than manually scrolling through thousands of Reddit posts across dozens of industry subreddits, the tool uses AI to analyze discussions systematically. It identifies recurring pain points, scores them based on intensity and frequency, and provides direct evidence with real quotes, upvote counts, and permalinks to source discussions.

For example, if you’re exploring SaaS pain points, PainOnSocial can surface the most-discussed integration frustrations from r/SaaS, r/startups, and related communities. If you’re entering healthcare, it can analyze discussions in medical professional subreddits to identify administrative burdens or system interoperability complaints. The tool curates 30+ pre-selected subreddits across industries, saving you weeks of manual research while ensuring you’re capturing authentic, validated pain points rather than assumptions.

Turning Pain Points Into Product Opportunities

Identifying pain points by industry is only half the battle. The real skill is translating those insights into products people will pay for:

Prioritize Based on Intensity and Frequency

Not all pain points are created equal. A problem that affects everyone mildly might be less valuable than a severe problem affecting a smaller segment. Look for the intersection of “this really hurts” and “lots of people experience this.”

Validate Willingness to Pay

People complain about many things they won’t actually pay to solve. Test whether the pain point is severe enough that customers would switch from their current solution or adopt a new tool. Are they already spending money trying to solve this problem?

Start With One Specific Pain Point

Resist the temptation to solve everything at once. Focus on becoming the best solution for one specific problem before expanding. This creates a clear value proposition and reduces time to market.

Build With Feedback Loops

Launch quickly with a solution that addresses the core pain point, then iterate based on user feedback. Your initial understanding of the problem will evolve as you watch people use your product in real situations.

Conclusion

Understanding pain points by industry isn’t just market research—it’s the foundation of building products that matter. Each industry has unique challenges shaped by regulations, customer expectations, competitive dynamics, and operational realities. Generic solutions rarely succeed because they don’t address the specific frustrations that drive purchasing decisions.

The entrepreneurs who win are those who listen carefully to their target industry, validate pain points through real conversations and behavior, and focus relentlessly on solving specific problems better than anyone else. Whether you’re entering SaaS, ecommerce, healthcare, finance, or any other sector, start with deep customer pain point research before writing a single line of code.

Take the time to truly understand what keeps your target customers awake at night. Listen where they already congregate. Analyze their complaints and frustrations. Then build something that makes their lives measurably better. That’s how you create products people actually want to buy.