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.
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
Every morning ClickRuntime reads new posts from the subreddits you chose.
It skips posts it has already looked at.
AI picks out posts describing a problem worth paying to solve and summarises each one.
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
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
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
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?
Can I describe what kind of ideas I want?
Will I see the same post twice?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
Related
You might also like
Get daily social post drafts from Reddit trends
Each morning you get an email with today's trending Reddit topics in your niche and a ready-to-edit social post for each.
See how it worksGet a digest of the best Reddit discussions
A short summary of the best discussions in your favourite subreddits lands in your inbox each week.
See how it worksGet emailed when someone on Reddit needs your product
When someone on Reddit asks for something your product solves, you get an email with the post and a suggested reply.
See how it worksKeep exploring
Set up “Email yourself business ideas found on Reddit” from your assistant
Copy the prompt above, or connect your assistant first. Free plan, no credit card.