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Daily

Email yourself business ideas found on Reddit

Each morning you get an email with the problems people described on Reddit that could be worth building a product for.

Runs
Daily
Apps
Gmail, Reddit
AI
Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
Access
Reddit read; Gmail gmail.send

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every morning, read new posts in r/smallbusiness and r/sweatystartup, pick out the problems people would pay to solve, and email me a short summary of each with the link.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

Indie hackers and would-be founders often hear that the best ideas come from listening to real complaints. Reddit is full of them, but it is easy to lose an hour scrolling and come away with nothing written down.

A short morning email with the day's most promising problems turns that habit into a quick read. Over weeks, the problems that keep recurring stand out as the ideas worth testing.

What you get out of it

  • A daily dose of real problems

    Each email gives a handful of concrete problems in people's own words, with links to the full posts.

  • Reading time cut to minutes

    AI filters out the noise, so you read summaries of the useful posts rather than scrolling through hundreds.

  • Ideas grounded in demand

    Every idea starts from someone describing a cost or frustration, which is a better starting point than brainstorming.

  • Easy to save and share

    Emails are searchable and easy to forward to a co-founder, building a record of ideas over time.

How it works

What happens, step by step

  1. Every morning ClickRuntime reads new posts from the subreddits you chose.

  2. It skips posts it has already looked at.

  3. AI picks out posts describing a problem worth paying to solve and summarises each one.

  4. The summaries and links are emailed to you from your Gmail.

Before it runs live

  • Connect Google through your own Google app (a one-time, 10-minute setup), so it works with your own Gmail
  • Connect Reddit

What you get

RunsDaily
Email yourself business ideas found on Reddittoday, 9:00Succeeded
Email · Business ideas from Reddit• Cleaners can't easily share before/after photos with clients – they use WhatsApp and lose track (reddit.com/r/sweatystartup/…) • Landscapers quoting jobs from memory and underpricing

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.
  • Your own rules

    Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.

  • Any number of apps

    One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.

  • AI where it helps

    Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.

  • On a schedule or on each event

    Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

  • Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
  • Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
  • Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
  • Combine it with other Gmail and Reddit steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.
email_of_business_opportunities_found_on_reddit.pyexample
import base64
from email.message import EmailMessage
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, state, ai

SUBS, ME = ["smallbusiness", "sweatystartup"], "me@example.com"

def reddit(path, **params):
    headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer " + credentials.connection("reddit", "main"), "User-Agent": "clickruntime/1.0"}
    return [c["data"] for c in http.get(f"https://oauth.reddit.com{path}", headers=headers, params=params).json()["data"]["children"]]

def send_email(subject, text):
    msg = EmailMessage()
    msg["To"], msg["Subject"] = ME, subject
    msg.set_content(text)
    gmail = build("gmail", "v1", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False)
    gmail.users().messages().send(userId="me", body={"raw": base64.urlsafe_b64encode(msg.as_bytes()).decode()}).execute()

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    seen = set(state.get("seen") or [])
    posts = [p for s in SUBS for p in reddit(f"/r/{s}/new", limit=50) if p["id"] not in seen]
    if not posts:
        return {"ideas": 0}
    listing = "\n".join(f"- {p['title']} | {p['selftext'][:300]} | https://reddit.com{p['permalink']}" for p in posts)
    summary = ai.generate(listing, max_output_tokens=900,
                          system="List only posts describing a concrete problem someone would pay to solve. For each: one-line problem, why it hurts, link.").text
    send_email("Business ideas from Reddit", summary)
    state.set("seen", (list(seen) + [p["id"] for p in posts])[-3000:])
    return {"checked": len(posts)}

FAQ

Common questions

How many ideas are in each email?
Usually three to eight, depending on how active the subreddits were. Days with nothing useful send a short note instead.
Can I describe what kind of ideas I want?
Yes. Tell it, for example, to focus on software ideas for trades businesses, and posts are filtered with that in mind.
Will I see the same post twice?
No. Posts already checked are remembered and skipped.
What permissions does it need?
Reddit read; Gmail gmail.send. Nothing else in your accounts is used.
Does it need AI?
Yes. It uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI, so you don't need an OpenAI or Anthropic key. Every plan includes a monthly AI allowance.
How many runs does it use?
One run each time it runs (daily). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.
Can I change how it works?
Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Set up “Email yourself business ideas found on Reddit” from your assistant

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