Hacker News Idea & Pain Point Finder

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Find validated startup ideas and customer pain points on Hacker News in seconds. Give it a topic — get back the posts and comments where real people complain, get frustrated, and ask "is there a tool that…".

Perfect for indie hackers, SaaS founders, marketers and product teams doing market research and idea validation.

What it does

For each topic you provide, the actor:

1. Searches Hacker News (stories, Ask HN, Show HN and/or comments) via the official HN Algolia API.
2. Scans each item's title and text for pain signals — frustration, complaints, and requests for tools/alternatives.
3. Scores every item by how many pain signals it contains and returns the strongest ones, with a direct HN link.

Input

Example input

{
"queries":["project management","time tracking"],
"tags":["story","ask_hn"],
"maxItemsPerQuery":100,
"sort":"relevance",
"time":"year",
"minPoints":5,
"minPainScore":1
}

Output

Each dataset item:

{
"query":"project management",
"painScore":3,
"matchedSignals":["frustration","has a problem with something","looking for a tool"],
"type":"Ask HN",
"title":"Ask HN: Why is project management software so frustrating?",
"snippet":"I've tried everything and I'm looking for a tool that just works…",
"hnUrl":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678",
"externalUrl":null,
"author":"someuser",
"points":142,
"numComments":87,
"createdAt":"2026-01-12T08:30:00.000Z"
}

Sort by painScore to find the strongest, most actionable complaints.

Notes & limits

• Uses the public Hacker News (Algolia) search API — no login or API key required.
• Pain detection is heuristic (pattern-based), tuned for precision over recall.
• Great companion to building products: validate that a problem is real before you code it.