I don't read Reddit for ideas anymore. A bot does it for me
I automate anything I can reach. If a task has to happen every day, sooner or later a script does it instead of me.
Picking an idea for my first micro-product went the same way. The format was already settled: a Telegram bot. What it should solve was not. The most honest source of ideas is people complaining about their jobs, and they do that on Reddit. Every day. By the truckload.
Reading all of that by hand means scrolling subreddits daily and skipping past self-promo. So I wrote a bot that reads it for me.
What it does
Once a day, at 9:00 UTC, cron wakes up on my server and runs the collector. It pulls posts from the last 24 hours:
- Reddit: subs like smallbusiness, Entrepreneur, freelance, accounting, sysadmin, ecommerce. Through the Arctic Shift archive, no API keys, no sign-up.
- Hacker News: Ask HN, plus comments containing “I wish there was”, “is there a tool”, “I would pay”.
- Stack Exchange and 1–2★ reviews of Chrome Web Store extensions, as a bonus.
Then an LLM reads every post with one question in mind: is there a real, recurring pain here that someone would pay $10–100 a month to fix? Self-promo, philosophy, news and the eternal “how do I find clients” go straight to the bin.
If there is a pain, the model gives two scores from 1 to 10: how much it hurts, and how well it fits a small SaaS for one to three developers. Then it writes up the pain, a possible product and who would pay for it.
What lands in Telegram
Every morning a digest drops into a Telegram channel: the top 10 ideas scoring 6 or higher.
Each idea comes with:
- 💢 the pain in plain words;
- 💰 who pays for it;
- 🔥 the score and tags;
- a link to the original post, so I can check the model didn’t make things up.
Ideas that passed the bar but missed the top 10 roll over to tomorrow. If the collector crashes, the bot says so: “❌ micro-saas-digest упал” (“crashed”). Silence would be worse than an error here. Without that message I’d spend a week thinking the internet ran out of ideas.
What it cost
About 450 lines of Python: collection, LLM calls, SQLite, Telegram. Every source is free and keyless. The only bill is for the model calls.
What I see so far
The LLM loves opening every idea with “Building a SaaS platform that…”. Every single item reads like a business plan from 2012. But the source link sits right there, and spotting the real pain takes a couple of seconds.
The main thing: the digest doesn’t pick the idea for me. It does the boring part. It reads a mountain of posts and leaves ten worth thinking about. The thinking is still on me, but now it happens over morning coffee instead of eating the workday.
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