Daily
Collect Reddit pain points as business ideas
Each day, Reddit posts where people describe a problem worth paying to solve are added to your sheet with a short AI summary.
- Runs
- Daily
- Apps
- Google Sheets, Reddit
- AI
- Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
- Access
- Reddit read; sheet edit
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every morning, read new posts in r/smallbusiness, r/freelance and r/Entrepreneur. Add the ones describing a real problem people would pay to solve to my Opportunities sheet with a one-line summary.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
Founders and product people looking for their next idea are told to find a painful problem first. Reddit is full of people describing exactly those problems, but reading hundreds of posts a day to find the few with real substance is impossible to keep up.
Filtering new posts down to the genuine problems and logging them in a sheet builds a research database over time. You can sort, tag and look for patterns, and the ideas that keep coming up become obvious.
What you get out of it
Real problems in people's own words
Each row links to a real post, so you see how people describe the problem, which is useful for both validation and marketing copy.
Noise filtered out
AI drops memes, promotions and vague questions, so only posts describing a concrete problem reach the sheet.
Patterns become visible
Weeks of rows in one sheet make recurring problems easy to spot, which is a stronger signal than any single post.
Research that runs every day
The database grows while you work on other things, without a daily reading habit to keep up.
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 decides which posts describe a real problem people would pay to solve and writes a one-line summary of each.
Those posts are added to your sheet with the summary, subreddit and link.
Before it runs live
- Connect your Google Sheets account and pick the spreadsheets it may use
- 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 Google Sheets and Reddit steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, state, ai
SUBS, SHEET_ID, RANGE = ["smallbusiness", "freelance", "Entrepreneur"], "your-spreadsheet-id", "Opportunities!A:D"
SCHEMA = {"type": "object", "properties": {"ideas": {"type": "array", "items": {"type": "object",
"properties": {"n": {"type": "integer"}, "summary": {"type": "string"}}}}}}
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 append_rows(rows):
sheets = build("sheets", "v4", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False)
sheets.spreadsheets().values().append(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range=RANGE, valueInputOption="RAW", body={"values": rows}).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 {"added": 0}
listing = "\n".join(f"{i}. {p['title']} | {p['selftext'][:400]}" for i, p in enumerate(posts))
ideas = ai.generate(listing, json_schema=SCHEMA, max_output_tokens=1200,
system="Return only posts describing a specific problem people would pay to solve, with a one-line summary.").json["ideas"]
rows = [[posts[i["n"]]["subreddit"], i["summary"], posts[i["n"]]["title"], "https://reddit.com" + posts[i["n"]]["permalink"]]
for i in ideas if 0 <= i["n"] < len(posts)]
if rows:
append_rows(rows)
state.set("seen", (list(seen) + [p["id"] for p in posts])[-3000:])
return {"checked": len(posts), "added": len(rows)}FAQ
Common questions
What counts as a business opportunity?
Which subreddits work best?
Does it read the comments too?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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