Summary: The best small-business ideas hide in work customers still do by hand around software they already pay for. Agents with social-web access (Agent Reach for YouTube, Reddit and X) can mine posts for workaround phrases like “I export it” or “does anyone know a workaround” and bring back the original posts. Research only produces hypotheses: you still talk to the people posting before assuming there’s a customer. An interviewing skill like Grill Me helps you list the assumptions to take into that conversation.
Key ideas
- Ask an agent: for software people already pay for, what are customers still doing by hand? Bring back the original posts (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money, greg-isenberg).
- Search phrases that signal workarounds: “I export it”, “I copy this into”, “does anyone know a workaround”. Collect a few recent examples from different people (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money, greg-isenberg).
- Plain LLMs are weak at this, so tools like Agent Reach set up access to social sites for cross-source research without manual collection (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money, greg-isenberg).
- Research isn’t validation: ask one poster to show what they actually do. The skill helps you prepare; the customer tells you what’s happening (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money, greg-isenberg).
- Surface hidden buyer questions early: for local franchise ads, who pays (owner or HQ) and who approves? You don’t want to build a dashboard and then learn every ad goes through head office (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money, greg-isenberg).
- The same research improves positioning for an existing product: customers’ own complaint wording becomes copy (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money, greg-isenberg).
Disagreements & open questions
- None yet.
Takeaways
- Have an agent search Reddit/X/YouTube for “I export it” / “workaround” posts about a paid tool and bring back originals (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money)
- Before building, contact one poster and ask them to show their workaround (startup-ideas—8-github-repos-viral-money)
Related
solo-builders · ai-growth-marketing · coding-agent-workflow · skill-engineering