Skip to content

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.

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

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

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

  2. It skips posts it has already looked at.

  3. AI decides which posts describe a real problem people would pay to solve and writes a one-line summary of each.

  4. 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

RunsDaily
Collect Reddit pain points as business ideastoday, 9:00Succeeded
Google Sheets · Opportunitiesr/freelance · Chasing late invoices takes 4 hours a month and clients ignore reminders · "How do you get clients to actually pay on time?"

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 Google Sheets 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.
find_business_opportunities_in_reddit_posts.pyexample
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?
A post where someone describes a specific, recurring problem, ideally mentioning time or money lost or a tool they tried that failed. You can describe your own criteria in the prompt.
Which subreddits work best?
Communities where people talk about their work, such as those for small business owners, freelancers or a specific trade. Niche communities usually give more specific problems.
Does it read the comments too?
This version reads the post title and text. Comments can be added for richer context, at the cost of more AI usage.
What permissions does it need?
Reddit read; sheet edit. 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 “Collect Reddit pain points as business ideas” from your assistant

Copy the prompt above, or connect your assistant first. Free plan, no credit card.