How to find customer pain points on Reddit
Reddit is where buyers complain with their guard down. Nobody is performing for an algorithm in a niche subreddit; they are asking strangers for help with a problem your product might solve. That makes the comments a direct feed of pain points in the customer's own words.
The skill is not finding complaints, Reddit has millions. It is finding the recurring ones, the pains enough people share that an ad built on them will land. Here is the process.
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Go where the complaints concentrate
Skip the giant default subreddits and find the 3-5 communities where your buyer already hangs out. For a skincare brand that is r/SkincareAddiction and r/30PlusSkinCare, not r/AskReddit. Then look for three thread shapes: 'does anyone else' threads, 'what do you use for' recommendation threads, and rant threads about a competitor or the category itself.
- Search operators help: site:reddit.com plus your category and words like 'frustrated', 'gave up', 'waste of money'.
- Sort threads by top comments. Upvotes are the community agreeing that a pain is real.
- Threads over 50 comments are worth scraping; the long tail of replies is where the specific language lives.
The phrases that signal a real pain point
A usable pain point has emotion and specificity. 'It's fine I guess' is nothing. 'I've bought three of these and every one died in a month' is an ad waiting to be written. Watch for time and money markers ('two years of this', 'wasted $200'), failed alternatives ('I tried X and Y before'), and identity statements ('as a mom of three', 'as someone with oily skin'). Those details are what make an ad feel like it was written for one person.
From a comment pile to ranked angles
Reading 300 comments and tallying themes by hand takes an afternoon per thread. Adlicio does the same job in about 60 seconds: paste the thread URL and it clusters the comments into the recurring pain points, desires, and objections, ranked by how often they recur, each with the verbatim quotes behind it.
The quotes matter more than the summary. When your hook uses the exact phrase a hundred commenters used, the ad reads like the customer's own inner monologue instead of marketing copy.
The 60-second version
- 01Collect 3-5 threads per pain hypothesis
One thread can be an outlier. Scrape a handful across different subreddits so the recurring pains separate from the one-off rants.
- 02Scrape each thread with Adlicio
Paste the URLs one at a time. Each scrape takes about 60 seconds and lands in your history, so the corpus builds as you go.
- 03Rank pains by recurrence, then write from the quotes
Take the top angle, lift the strongest verbatim phrase into your hook, and test it against your current control.
Questions people also ask
Which subreddits are best for customer research?+
The niche ones where your buyer asks for advice, not the giant defaults. Look for subreddits about the problem your product solves, plus the buy-it-for-life and anti-consumption communities where people dissect product failures in detail.
How is this different from just reading Reddit?+
Reading gives you impressions; scraping gives you counts. A pain point that shows up in 40 of 300 comments is an angle. One loud rant is not. Clustering the full thread separates the two.
Can I use Reddit comments in my ads?+
Use the language, not the person. Lift the phrasing and the emotion into your copy rather than quoting an identifiable user verbatim in paid media.
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Run this play on your own Reddit page.
Paste one public URL. Adlicio returns the angle, hook, and proof to test next.