Reddit market research for a product idea, run by an agent.

Reddit is where people ask strangers for a tool before they search for one. A founder can read those threads to learn three things: what buyers already use, what annoys them about it, and how crowded the answers are.

By hand, you search Reddit for the job your product does, open the threads with the most comments, and copy the complaints into a sheet. With an agent, you give one prompt. It searches Reddit, reads the biggest thread, checks Hacker News for products that already launched, and pulls Google search volume so you can see whether the pain shows up beyond Reddit. The run below did that for an invoicing app for freelancers.

The pain is real and repeated. Freelancers describe the same loop in different words: build the invoice in a spreadsheet, export a PDF, email it, then check by hand who paid. The big accounting suites come up as too much for a handful of invoices a month.

The market is also crowded at the cheap end. 7 of the first 25 comments in the largest thread pitch an app the commenter built, and 11 of the 20 Hacker News stories shown were posted in 2025 or 2026. The 8 stories from 2026, all product posts, got 1 to 3 points each. Another simple invoice generator would enter a queue.

The posts point to narrower gaps. A small rental business wants quote, contract, signature and payment in one flow, priced for months with uneven revenue. A freelancer paid from abroad loses money on transfer fees. Two comments warn that tax rules differ by country. Each of those is a niche you could test with a landing page before you build.

Where to listen matters. r/freelance had one matching post in the past year, while 4 of the 7 relevant posts sat in r/Invoice.

It read 7 posts and the first 25 of 102 comments in one thread. That is a sample, not a survey, and Reddit search ranks by relevance, not by how common a complaint is. Read more pages of comments and a few more queries before you size anything.

Every Reddit call answered, at $0.0047 each. The first search sorted by comment count and returned the busiest threads of the year on other topics, and it was billed like any answer. Sort by relevance when you want posts about your query. The run did not read private messages or anything behind a login, and it shows no usernames.

Search volume is a monthly estimate for Google US. The keyword tool reported "free invoice generator" at 10 searches a month, which looks too low for a phrase that common, so treat any single figure with care and compare a second source before you plan content around it.