Lesson 2 of 6

Find a Problem Worth Money

Most ideas solve mild annoyances nobody pays to fix. Learn to spot the painful, frequent, expensive problems.

8 min read

You do not get to pick whether your problem is worth money. The market already decided, and your job is to find out what it decided before you spend six months betting otherwise. Most ideas die here, on the simple fact that the problem they solve is real but mild, the kind of thing people grumble about and then forget. A problem worth building on is painful, frequent, and already costing someone money or time they would love to get back.

Painkillers get paid, vitamins get cut

There is a clean way to sort problems: painkillers versus vitamins. A painkiller solves an active pain that is costing the person right now, money bleeding out, hours wasted every week, a risk that keeps them up at night. A vitamin is a nice-to-have that improves things in theory. The trouble with vitamins is that they are the first thing cut when a budget tightens or a week gets busy, which is always. People pay reliably to stop pain. They pay erratically to feel slightly better.

This is uncomfortable because most fun ideas are vitamins. The clever productivity tweak, the nicer dashboard, the thing that would be lovely if people had the time. Be honest about which one you have. A boring painkiller for an unglamorous audience, late invoices for plumbers, no-shows for dentists, will out-earn an exciting vitamin every time, because the plumber feels the pain on Friday and reaches for a fix.

Frequency: does this hurt weekly or daily, not once a year?
Cost: is the person already losing money, hours, or sleep to it?
Workaround spend: are they paying for a clunky tool, a freelancer, or a spreadsheet hack today?
Urgency: would they fix it in the next 30 days if a good option existed?

Demand you can find already exists

You are not inventing demand. You are finding it. Real problems leave tracks: people complain about them in public, in the same words, over and over. Reddit threads, niche forums, the one-star and three-star reviews of tools that almost solve it. The three-star reviews are the richest, because the customer cares enough to keep using the thing and is still annoyed enough to write about it. That gap is where a business hides.

Pay attention to the phrases that repeat. I wish there was a way to, is there a tool that, how do you all deal with. When you see the same complaint from different people who do not know each other, you are looking at a problem with a market, not a one-off gripe. Collect a lot of it before you judge any of it. Raw complaints are worth more than one polished idea you fell for on day one.

Pick the problem you have a reason to win

Two founders can chase the same painful problem and one moves twice as fast, because they already know the customer, the jargon, and where these people gather. That head start is founder-market fit, and at the idea stage it matters more than how exciting the concept sounds. A dull problem you understand from the inside beats a glamorous one you would have to research from scratch.

This does not trap you in your current job. It means that for any problem on your shortlist, you should be honest about your starting advantage. If you have none, you are not disqualified, but you are signing up for a longer climb, and you should know that before you commit. The best first idea is usually a painful problem, in a market you can reach, that you happen to understand.

Worked example

A three-star review is a product brief

Pick any popular tool in a category you understand and read its three-star reviews on a site like G2 or the app store. You will find a pattern: people who pay for it, rely on it, and are quietly furious about one or two things it does badly. Love the product but the reporting is useless and support takes days. That sentence is a list of problems someone is already paying to have solved badly.

You do not need to out-build the incumbent. You need to solve the one thing its paying customers keep complaining about, for the slice of them who feel it most. The demand is proven by the fact that they already pay. The opportunity is the gap they keep writing about in three-star reviews.

Learn by doing

Paste these into ChatGPT or Claude and run them against your own idea. The model will answer happily. Olune goes further and checks the answer against real Reddit threads, competitor maps, and keyword volume.

Tip: grab the downloadable playbook to run every play with fill-in worksheets →

Prompt 1 · Sort your idea into painkiller or vitamin, honestly.

My idea solves this problem: [describe the problem and who has it]. Act as a blunt investor. Tell me whether this is a painkiller or a vitamin, and why. Score it on frequency, cost to the customer, and urgency. If it is a vitamin, tell me what would have to be true for it to become a painkiller, or what adjacent painful problem I should chase instead.

What a good output looks like

It might say: vitamin. A nicer way to organize bookmarks is not costing anyone money, so it gets cut. The painful version nearby is teams losing research because it is scattered across five tools. That has a cost. Aim there. Blunt, but it saves you months.

Prompt 2 · Mine real complaints for a problem with a market.

I am exploring problems in this space: [niche or audience]. List the specific, repeated complaints real people in this group post online, in their own words, and where they tend to post them (subreddits, forums, review sites). For each, note whether it sounds like a painkiller or a vitamin, and what they currently use as a workaround.

What a good output looks like

You get a starter map: r/freelance, repeated gripe about chasing late payments, workaround is awkward manual reminders, painkiller. It is a research head-start that you then verify yourself by reading the actual threads.

Key terms in this lesson

Takeaways

Painkillers get paid. Vitamins get cut the moment a week gets busy. Be honest about which you have.
You find demand, you do not invent it. The same complaint from strangers is a market signal.
Three-star reviews of existing tools are pre-written product briefs.
Founder-market fit, knowing the customer already, beats an exciting idea you would learn from scratch.

Now run your own idea through it.

You have the method. Olune does the legwork: an honest build-or-kill verdict on live Reddit signals, competitor maps, and keyword volume, in about eight minutes. Free to start.

Test your idea →

Common questions

What if lots of people have the problem but none of them pay for anything?

Then you have a market with no budget, which is one of the most expensive traps at the idea stage. Consumers with a free workaround are notoriously hard to convert. Look for the slice who already pay something, even a clunky tool or a freelancer, because existing spend is the clearest proof a problem is worth money.

Can a vitamin ever be a business?

Yes, but it is a harder game that usually needs scale, virality, or a very low price, and that is a tough first project for a solo founder. If you are choosing your first idea, stack the odds in your favor and pick the painkiller.

How many problems should I look at before picking one?

Enough that you are choosing, not settling. Collect complaints for a week or two across a few audiences you could reach, then filter for frequency, cost, and your own unfair advantage. The goal is a shortlist you can test, not one idea you married on day one.