Customer Research

How to Solve Customer Pain Points: A Founder's Guide to Building Products People Love

10 min read

Every successful product starts with one fundamental truth: it solves a real problem that real people have. Yet countless startups fail because they build solutions to problems that don’t exist—or worse, problems that customers don’t care enough about to pay for. If you’re a founder or entrepreneur, learning to solve customer pain points isn’t just a nice skill to have; it’s the difference between building something people tolerate and creating something they can’t live without.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the complete process of identifying, validating, and solving customer pain points in a way that leads to product-market fit. Whether you’re in the ideation phase or trying to improve an existing product, these strategies will help you build something that truly matters to your customers.

Understanding What Customer Pain Points Really Are

Before you can solve customer pain points, you need to understand what they actually are. A pain point isn’t just any problem—it’s a specific frustration or obstacle that prevents your target customer from achieving their goals or forces them to waste time, money, or effort.

Customer pain points typically fall into four categories:

Financial pain points: Your customers are spending too much money on their current solution or process
Productivity pain points: They’re wasting time on inefficient processes or workflows
Process pain points: Their current systems are clunky, complicated, or difficult to use
Support pain points: They’re not getting adequate help during critical phases of the customer journey

The key is intensity. A mild annoyance isn’t a pain point worth solving. You’re looking for problems that keep people up at night, force them to create workarounds, or cost them significant resources. These are the pain points that customers will actually pay to solve.

Why Most Founders Get Pain Point Discovery Wrong

The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is asking customers what they want instead of observing what they actually struggle with. People are notoriously bad at articulating their true needs. They’ll tell you they want a faster horse when what they really need is a car.

Here’s where most founders go wrong:

Relying on surveys alone: Surveys can provide data, but they’re filtered through what people think they should say. You miss the emotional intensity and context that reveals truly painful problems.

Talking to the wrong people: Your friends, family, and general “potential users” aren’t your real customers. You need to talk to people who are actively experiencing the problem right now and have shown they’re willing to take action to solve it.

Accepting surface-level answers: When someone says “I need better project management software,” that’s not the real pain point. You need to dig deeper: What’s broken about their current solution? What specific task frustrates them daily? What have they already tried?

Ignoring frequency and intensity: A problem that occurs once a year isn’t as valuable as one that happens daily. A minor inconvenience won’t drive purchase decisions like a critical blocker will.

The Framework for Discovering Real Customer Pain Points

Now let’s get into the practical process of uncovering pain points that are worth solving. This framework has been used by successful founders to validate ideas before writing a single line of code.

Step 1: Find Where Your Customers Congregate

The first step in solving customer pain points is finding where your target customers are already discussing their problems. This could be:

Industry-specific online communities and forums
Reddit communities related to your niche
LinkedIn groups and discussions
Twitter threads and replies
Product review sites (especially the negative reviews)
Customer support forums of existing solutions

The advantage of these spaces is that people are being authentic. They’re venting real frustrations, asking genuine questions, and sharing unfiltered experiences. This is gold for pain point discovery.

Step 2: Look for Pain Patterns, Not Individual Complaints

One person complaining isn’t a pattern. You’re looking for the same fundamental problem appearing repeatedly, even if described in different ways. As you research, keep a spreadsheet tracking:

The specific problem mentioned
How frequently it appears
The intensity of frustration (look for emotional language)
What solutions people have already tried
How much they’re willing to pay or do to solve it

When you see the same pain point mentioned by dozens of people across multiple communities, you’ve found something worth investigating further.

Step 3: Conduct Deep Customer Interviews

Once you’ve identified potential pain points, validate them through one-on-one conversations. But here’s the critical part: you’re not pitching your solution. You’re on a fact-finding mission.

Use questions like:

“Tell me about the last time you experienced [problem]”
“What have you already tried to solve this?”
“How much time/money does this problem cost you?”
“If you had a magic wand, what would the perfect solution look like?”
“What’s the worst part about this problem?”

Pay special attention to stories and specific examples. General statements like “it’s frustrating” aren’t as valuable as “Last Tuesday, I spent three hours manually copying data between systems and still made errors that cost us a client.”

Leveraging Online Communities for Pain Point Research

Reddit has become one of the most valuable resources for pain point discovery. Unlike polished LinkedIn posts or filtered survey responses, Reddit discussions are raw and honest. People complain openly, share workarounds, and discuss what’s not working in their businesses and lives.

The challenge is scale. Manually searching through thousands of Reddit posts across multiple subreddits is time-consuming. You might spend weeks reading through discussions only to miss critical patterns or emerging pain points.

This is where smart founders are turning to AI-powered tools to accelerate their research. PainOnSocial specifically addresses this challenge by analyzing real Reddit discussions using AI to surface the most frequent and intense pain points. Instead of manually combing through posts, you can see validated problems backed by actual quotes, upvote counts, and permalinks to the original discussions—all scored by frequency and intensity. For entrepreneurs trying to solve customer pain points efficiently, this means you can validate demand for your solution based on real conversations happening right now, rather than relying solely on surveys or interviews that might not capture authentic frustrations.

Validating That a Pain Point Is Worth Solving

Not every pain point makes a good business opportunity. Before you commit to building a solution, validate these key criteria:

The Problem Must Be Frequent Enough

If a problem only occurs once a month, it’s hard to build a sustainable business around it. Look for daily or weekly pain points that create consistent demand for solutions.

The Problem Must Be Intense Enough

People pay to solve urgent, expensive, or painful problems. They don’t pay much to solve minor inconveniences. Validate that your target customers are actively seeking solutions right now, not just passively wishing things were better.

There Must Be a Viable Customer Segment

Can you reach enough people with this pain point to build a business? Is this segment growing or shrinking? Do they have the budget to pay for solutions?

The Timing Must Be Right

Some pain points are ahead of their time. Others are yesterday’s problems. Look for problems that are becoming more acute due to market trends, technology changes, or shifting customer behaviors.

Prioritizing Which Pain Points to Solve First

Once you’ve identified multiple validated pain points, you need to prioritize. You can’t solve everything at once, especially as an early-stage startup.

Use this prioritization framework:

Impact vs. Effort Matrix: Plot pain points based on the impact of solving them (revenue potential, market size) versus the effort required (time, resources, technical complexity). Start with high-impact, low-effort opportunities.

Core vs. Nice-to-Have: Which pain points are critical blockers versus minor frustrations? Lead with the critical problems that customers will pay premium prices to solve.

Immediate vs. Future: Some pain points need solving today. Others are emerging trends. For your MVP, focus on immediate pain that’s driving current purchase decisions.

Building Solutions That Actually Solve the Pain

Here’s where many founders stumble: they correctly identify a pain point but build the wrong solution. Understanding the problem is only half the battle.

Start With the Minimum Viable Solution

Don’t build a comprehensive platform when a simple tool will do. Your first version should solve the core pain point in the simplest way possible. You can add features later based on customer feedback.

Ask yourself: “What’s the absolute minimum we need to build to solve this specific pain point for our target customer?” Then build that and nothing more.

Involve Customers in the Solution Design

The best product teams bring customers into the development process early. Share mockups, prototypes, and early versions. Watch how they use it. Listen to what confuses them. Iterate based on real usage, not assumptions.

Measure If You’re Actually Solving the Pain

Define clear metrics that indicate you’re solving the pain point:

Time saved compared to previous solution
Money saved or revenue generated
Reduction in errors or problems
Improvement in customer satisfaction or NPS
Increase in task completion rates

If your solution isn’t moving these metrics, you’re not actually solving the pain point—you’re just building features.

Common Pitfalls When Solving Customer Pain Points

Even with good research, founders can still go wrong in the execution phase. Watch out for these common mistakes:

Solving for yourself instead of customers: Just because you experience a pain point doesn’t mean it’s widespread. Validate that others share your frustration before building.

Over-engineering the solution: Complex solutions often fail because they’re too difficult to use. The best solutions are simple, focused, and intuitive.

Ignoring competitive alternatives: Your customers may already have workarounds or competitors solving similar problems. Understand why those solutions fall short and how you’ll be meaningfully different.

Failing to communicate value clearly: Even if you solve a real pain point, customers won’t buy if they don’t understand how your solution helps them. Your messaging must clearly connect your product to their specific frustration.

Continuous Pain Point Discovery

Solving customer pain points isn’t a one-time exercise. Markets evolve, new problems emerge, and old solutions become obsolete. The most successful companies maintain ongoing customer discovery as part of their culture.

Build these practices into your routine:

Schedule regular customer interviews (monthly minimum)
Monitor support tickets and feature requests for emerging patterns
Stay active in communities where your customers discuss problems
Analyze churn data to understand what pain points you’re not solving
Track competitor releases to spot market gaps and opportunities

The companies that win long-term are those that stay obsessively focused on customer problems, not on their own product features.

Conclusion: Make Pain Point Discovery Your Competitive Advantage

In a world where anyone can build software or launch a product, your competitive advantage comes from deeply understanding customer pain points better than anyone else. The founders who win aren’t necessarily the best developers or the most well-funded—they’re the ones who identify real problems and solve them in ways that customers value.

Start today by choosing one customer segment and one potential pain point. Validate it through real conversations and community research. Build the simplest solution that addresses the core frustration. Measure whether you’re actually solving the problem. Then iterate based on feedback.

Remember: customers don’t buy products. They buy solutions to their pain points. The clearer you are about what hurts and why, the easier it becomes to build something they’ll not only buy but enthusiastically recommend to others.

Ready to discover validated pain points from real customer conversations? Start exploring communities where your customers are already discussing their biggest challenges, and build solutions that matter.