Most founders spend months building something nobody asked for. The irony is that thousands of people are publicly asking for solutions every single day — on Hacker News, GitHub issues, Stack Overflow, and Product Hunt. They're just scattered across platforms, buried in noise.
This post walks through how to systematically find SaaS ideas from online discussions, without guessing.
Why Online Discussions Are a Gold Mine
When someone posts "I can't believe there's no good tool for X" on Hacker News and gets 300 upvotes and 150 comments, that's not just venting. That's validated demand with a built-in audience.
The signal is in three things:
- Volume — how many people are talking about the same problem
- Engagement — are people upvoting, commenting, sharing? That shows emotional investment
- Cross-platform presence — a problem that appears on HN and GitHub and Stack Overflow is real. Platform diversity is one of the strongest signals of genuine pain
The Four Best Sources for SaaS Ideas
Hacker News
Hacker News "Ask HN" threads are particularly valuable. Searches like "what tools do you wish existed" or "what do you use for X" regularly surface specific, technically-validated pain points. The audience skews developer/founder, meaning they're both the pain-havers and potential paying customers. The HN search tool lets you search the full archive — type any problem domain and see years of discussion.
GitHub Issues
GitHub Issues on popular repos are explicit feature requests. When 500 people thumbs-up an issue saying "please add X", that's a waiting market. If the maintainers aren't going to build it, you can. Try filtering by most-reacted issues across all public repos to find the highest-signal requests.
Stack Overflow
Unanswered Stack Overflow questions with high view counts = problems people are actively struggling with. Questions with thousands of views but no accepted answer often indicate a gap in existing tooling. The Unanswered tab sorted by votes is a goldmine.
Product Hunt
Product Hunt upvoted products with reviews saying "great but doesn't do X" tell you exactly what the next product should do. The comments on a competitor's launch are your roadmap. Pay attention to products in the developer tools and productivity categories — these audiences pay.
What to Look For
Not every complaint is a business opportunity. Here's what separates noise from signal:
High buying intent markers:
- "We pay $X/month for [existing solution] and it still doesn't..."
- "I'd pay for this immediately"
- People listing specific workflows that are broken
- Mentions of existing budget being spent on workarounds
Low buying intent markers:
- Philosophical debates ("AI is going to change everything")
- Problems that are interesting but not urgent
- Audiences who historically don't pay for software (students, hobbyists)
- Topics driven by news cycles rather than persistent pain
The Manual vs. Automated Approach
You can do this manually — spend an hour a day reading threads, keeping a spreadsheet, tracking patterns. Many successful founders built their first product this way.
The problem is consistency. Manual monitoring misses things, gets tedious, and doesn't give you a systematic way to compare signal strength across opportunities.
The automated approach is to use a tool that continuously monitors multiple platforms, normalizes the engagement metrics for fair cross-platform comparison, and surfaces the top opportunities ranked by a composite signal strength score — not just raw mention volume.
That's exactly what Niche Sonar does. It monitors Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Product Hunt daily, uses Claude AI to identify and cluster emerging problems, and ranks them by a signal that accounts for mentions, engagement, platform diversity, pain severity, and buying intent.
A Practical Framework
If you're doing this manually, here's a repeatable system:
- Daily sweep (15 min): Check HN front page + Ask HN, scan GitHub trending, skim Stack Overflow newest for your tech tags
- Weekly clustering (30 min): Group your notes by theme. What problems keep coming up?
- Validation check: For each theme, ask: Is there evidence of willingness to pay? How weak are existing solutions? Is this one platform or several?
- Competitive scan: Search for existing tools. "No good solution" complaints sometimes mean "the solution exists but nobody's found it." Make sure you know what's out there before building.
The Best SaaS Ideas Have Three Things
Looking back at successful indie SaaS products, the pattern is consistent:
- Specific, persistent pain — not a trend, but something people have struggled with for years
- Weak or absent incumbent solutions — either nothing exists, or what exists is expensive/clunky/enterprise-focused
- An audience that buys software — developers, small business owners, marketers, ops teams
If you find a problem that scores high on all three, you've found a business worth building.
Niche Sonar monitors 140+ daily discussions across Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Product Hunt — and surfaces the top 10 emerging opportunities every day, ranked by signal strength. Start your free trial to see what people are asking for right now.