Discover Real Market Problems from Reddit Posts with OpenAI

Automate Market Problem Discovery from Reddit with OpenAI

Who’s it for

This workflow is perfect for entrepreneurs, startup founders, product managers, researchers, and market analysts who want to automatically discover and analyze real market problems from online discussions.
While this example focuses on identifying issues in the future of work and future of education, it can be fully adapted to detect any type of market pain point by changing the data sources and AI prompts.

If you’re looking to automate market research, find customer pain points, or detect unmet needs in your industry, this template is for you.

What it does

This no-code n8n automation:

1. Collects fresh discussions from Reddit (default: Teachers, Education, RemoteWork subreddits).
2. Filters posts by engagement (more than 5 upvotes by default).
3. Uses OpenAI GPT-4.1 to:
   • Detect if a post describes a real market problem.
   • Identify the underlying pain or unmet need.
   • Suggest a practical, tech/AI-based solution.
   • Score the problem’s Impact, Confidence, and Ease of prototyping (ICE framework).
4. Saves results to Google Sheets for easy prioritization and action.

This allows you to automate the detection of market opportunities without manually reading through hundreds of posts.

How it works

• Schedule Trigger: Runs the workflow at your preferred interval (daily, hourly, etc.).
• Reddit Nodes: Pull posts from the targeted subreddits (you can replace them with any niche communities).
• Filter Node: Keeps only posts with engagement above your threshold.
• OpenAI Node: Analyzes each post using a User Prompt and System Prompt in English, returning structured JSON data.
• Google Sheets Node: Stores all results with full scoring for later review and prioritization.

Requirements

• Reddit OAuth2 API credentials.
• OpenAI API key.
• Google Sheets OAuth2 API credentials.
• A Google Sheet with these columns:
  SubReddit, Title, Content, Short Description, Detected Pain, Possible Solution, Impact, Confidence, Ease, URL, ICE Score

How to customize

• Change the market focus: Replace example subreddits with your own industry forums or communities.
• Adjust the filter criteria: Modify the upvote threshold or other parameters.
• Edit the AI prompts: Tailor them to detect specific types of problems (healthtech, fintech, sustainability, etc.).
• Integrate more sources: Add Twitter, LinkedIn, or customer support logs for richer insights.

💡 With this automation, you can continuously monitor and capture market pain points, turning raw online discussions into actionable business opportunities.