Free tool
Pain Receipts
Type a niche and see the real customer pains our discovery sweeps have already sourced — each labelled with where it came from, and linked to the page whenever we captured one. Don't trust the score; click the source. The evidence your idea has to have.
How do you find real customer problems in a niche?
Type a niche and Pain Receipts shows documented customer problems that WhittleOS discovery sweeps already found, each labelled with where it came from and linked to the page whenever a canonical link was captured. The rule it is built around: don't trust a score, click the source. No signup, and a thin niche honestly returns nothing.
We search pains the WhittleOS engine has already sourced from public discussions. Type a niche, not your whole idea — and your text never goes in the URL.
How this works
Every pain here was mined by a real WhittleOS discovery sweep from a public source — a Hacker News thread, a review or listing page, a public search result. We only store pains we can attribute to a public source, so every line carries a clickable source ↗. We never invent a pain to fill a gap: if we haven't sourced your niche yet, you get an honest "nothing yet", not a fabricated result.
“Seen in N sweeps” means N separate searches turned the same problem up again — it is not a vote count, and a row a single sweep found says “seen once”. The score beside it is how badly people describe the problem combined with that count: not a headcount, and not a market size. Most rows say “seen once”, and on those the score is carried entirely by how the problem was described.
This is the evidence layer, deliberately before the paywall. It is not a verdict on your idea — it shows you whether a real, recurring, citeable pain exists for a niche. To turn that into a decision, point the engine at your own situation:
From evidence to a decision
A founder read looks at your founder profile and tells you which directions fit before you build — 1 credit, covered by the 2 free credits every new account starts with. Already have an idea? Run a Single Idea Check for a blunt Build it / Test it first / Drop it.