Where to find people to talk to about your startup idea, when most subreddits ban market research

The short answer

“But where?” The question nobody answered

In October 2026 a founder on r/founder (78,000+ members) posted that 20+ products in a few years had mostly failed. The old process was “Come up with an idea → Code it → Launch it → 0 users.” The new one put “Talk to people” second. The thread agreed. One commenter gave the standard advice:

“Best thing to do is ask on Reddit imho.”r/founder

The reply under it got no answer:

“But where? Most subReddits don’t seem to allow market research or ask people for feedback?”r/founder

That reply is correct, and this page answers it. “Talk to users” is the most repeated advice in startups and the least specified. One builder in our corpus put it bluntly:

“Most people say ‘talk to users’ but that’s vague af.”r/microsaas

The questions to ask are covered in our customer discovery questions guide. This page covers the step before it: where to find the people, and how to approach them without getting banned. If you already built and launched to silence, start with what to do after building a product nobody wants, then come back here.

What 10 big subreddits actually allow

We fetched the published rules of 10 large subreddits founders are told to use, plus r/AskTeachers, on October 9, 2026. Member counts come from each subreddit’s public profile on the same day. Here is what each one allows for someone trying to research an idea.

Four patterns stand out across the 10:

• 3 ban market research outright (r/smallbusiness, r/Teachers, r/Accounting) and r/restaurateur discourages it. These are buyer communities, not founder communities.
• 2 route research to a sanctioned place: r/startups to its weekly Feedback thread, r/SaaS to moderator approval with a “Mod Approved” flair.
• 5 restrict DMs in some form (r/SaaS, r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, r/microsaas, r/Accounting). Mass-messaging posters is the fastest route to a ban.
• 4 ban AI-written posts (r/SaaS, r/Entrepreneur, r/sysadmin, r/Teachers). A ChatGPT-drafted “quick question for founders” post is now a rule violation in the places most likely to see it.

r/smallbusiness puts the alternative in its own rule: “Our deep library of past posts are your guide to what everyone needs if you are willing to search and analyze.” That is step 2 below.

Where problems actually get posted

Founder subreddits are where founders ask. They are not where buyers complain. BigIdeasDB’s Reddit pipeline has extracted 2,300+ pain points from 170+ subreddits. Grouped by the kind of community they came from:

The finding: three communities that ban market research hold almost as many pain points (176) as eight founder communities combined (190), and a higher share of them are rated high impact (74.4% vs 69.5%). r/smallbusiness is the single largest source in the corpus with 85 pain points (75.3% high impact), and r/Teachers is second with 66 (74.2%). The places where you are not allowed to ask are the places where people already told.

Below them sit communities most founders never open: r/personalfinance (54), r/homeautomation (52), r/marketing (49), r/photography (46), r/freelance (42), r/healthcare (40), r/legaladvice (35). Each is organised around a job or a life task, which is where a problem gets described with enough detail to build on. Our guide to finding problems to solve covers how to turn those threads into a shortlist, and business ideas that solve real problems shows what that shortlist looks like when it is done.

Step 1: Name the person, not the market

You cannot find “small businesses.” You can find “office managers at 5-20 person construction firms who do invoicing at month-end.” Write three things down before you look anywhere:

• Job title of the person who feels the problem.
• Industry and size of the business they work in.
• The moment the problem happens: month-end, a busy season, onboarding a client, a failed delivery.

If you cannot fill in the job title, you do not have a customer yet, you have a theme. An ideal customer profile fixes that. One r/founder commenter gave the shortcut most successful founders take:

“Most people start from the industry they work in”r/founder

If you have worked in an industry, your former colleagues are the warmest list you will ever have. If you have not, our guide to validating an idea in an industry you don’t know covers how to borrow that context. If you have no idea yet, start with how to come up with a business idea or what to do when you have no ideas.

Step 2: Read what they already wrote (no permission needed)

Every rule in the table above governs posting. None of them govern reading. A complaint someone posted last month is an interview you did not have to schedule, given by someone who had no idea a founder was listening. That removes the politeness problem that ruins most live interviews.

Three places hold most of it:

• Forums and subreddits for the job you named in step 1. Search the subreddit for the task, not for your solution: “invoicing,” “scheduling,” “month end,” “spreadsheet.” Our guide on finding business ideas on Reddit and the help page on using Reddit for idea validation cover the search mechanics.
• Software review sites (Capterra, G2) for business buyers. Read the 2- and 3-star reviews. See how to analyse G2 reviews for product ideas.
• App store reviews for consumer problems. See how to analyse app store reviews and finding ideas in negative reviews.

Review sites also tell you who to contact, because every review carries a job title. In 273,000+ Capterra reviews in our database, nearly every one (99.98%) lists the reviewer’s title. The most common single title is “Owner” (13,000+ reviews), then CEO (8,900+), Director (5,300+) and President (3,800+). That is your target list for step 5, sorted by who actually writes about software.

And the unhappy ones skew toward the people who sign the cheque:

Owners write 17.4% of all titled reviews but 22.1% of the low-star ones. Their low-star rate (10.8%) is about 1.4 times that of individual contributors (7.6%). The person most likely to complain in public is the person with the budget. Only 1.6% of these reviews carry a vendor reply, so most of those complaints sit there unanswered.

Industry matters too. Reviewers in construction (10.1% low-star, n = 9,500+), retail (10.5%, n = 7,900+), automotive (10.3%, n = 5,400+) and health (10.1%, n = 8,900+) are far less happy with their software than reviewers in IT services (5.7%, n = 18,000+). If you want people with an unsolved problem who will talk about it, the non-tech, owner-run industries are where to look first.

BigIdeasDB indexes 1M+ complaints from Reddit, app stores, G2 and Capterra in one place, so this reading step takes an afternoon rather than a month. Search a problem on the pain-point search or browse the complaints database to see which communities and job titles it comes from.

Step 3: Reply in public where the problem was posted

Reading tells you who has the problem. Replying turns them into a conversation. The rule-safe way is to answer the post where they wrote it:

1. Pick posts that match your step-1 person exactly. Recent ones, from the last few months, with detail about what they tried.
2. Add something useful first. A workaround you know, a question that shows you read the whole post, a relevant detail from your own work.
3. Ask one follow-up in the thread. “How are you handling it right now?” or “How often does this hit you?” Past behaviour, never “would you use an app that...”
4. Move to a private message only after they reply, and only where the subreddit allows it. r/Accounting bans messaging users because of their comments; r/startups lets you engage privately on your own initiative but not post DM requests.

This works because the person already showed two things: they have the problem, and they are willing to talk about it. A cold survey link shows neither. It also follows the rule most of these communities share: contribute before you take. r/Entrepreneur makes it explicit, requiring you to participate in other posts’ comments before posting yourself.

Step 4: Use the threads built for feedback

Some communities do want founder questions, in a specific place. Use them, and expect feedback from builders rather than buyers.

• r/startups weekly Feedback thread. All feedback requests, including surveys and polls, go here. The rules ask you to give feedback to others in the thread and ask them to return it.
• r/startups Monthly Share Your Startup thread. The only place there you may name your startup.
• r/SaaS with mod approval. Message the moderators through modmail with your survey link and why it helps the community. Posts without the “Mod Approved” flair are removed.
• r/smallbusiness weekly threads. Share-your-experience and promote-your-business threads exist, but market research is still banned.
• r/AskTeachers for real questions to teachers, asked as questions. Not polls, not surveys, not products.
• r/SideProject once you have something built and want reactions to it.

A rule of thumb: a feedback thread tells you whether other founders find the idea clear. It rarely tells you whether the buyer will pay. Treat it as a pitch check, not validation.

Step 5: Go where the job happens, off Reddit

Reddit is one place people complain. Most of the people you want are reachable elsewhere, by the job title from step 1.

• LinkedIn search by title and industry. “Office manager” + “construction” + your region. Use the titles from the Capterra table: owner, operations manager, office manager, general manager.
• The reviewers themselves. A review shows a title, an industry and a company size. Find people with that profile on LinkedIn and open with the problem, never with the review.
• Trade associations and their events. Most industries have a state or national association with member directories, newsletters and meetups.
• Local businesses, in person. Owner-run shops, clinics and trades will often give 10 minutes at a quiet hour. Bring one question, not a deck.
• Industry Slack, Discord and Facebook groups. Same rules as Reddit: read the group rules, contribute first, no unsolicited pitches.
• Freelance job posts. A job post asking someone to do a task by hand is a person paying for a workaround. They are prequalified.
• Former colleagues and their contacts. One warm introduction outperforms a stack of cold messages.

One r/founder commenter summed up why this is slow: “it take years of expericne searching brainstorming and most important connections networking.” The shortcut is not skipping the networking. It is aiming it at a specific title in a specific industry.

Step 6: Ask for 15 minutes about their last time

Short messages get answers. Long ones get ignored. A template that respects every rule above:

Hi [name], I saw your post in [community] about [specific problem]. I’m researching how [job title]s handle [task] and I’m not selling anything. Could I ask you about the last time it happened? 15 minutes, any time [two specific slots], or a few lines by message if that’s easier.

Why each part is there:

• The specific post or job shows you are not mass-messaging.
• “Not selling anything” is only true if you then do not pitch. Do not pitch.
• “The last time it happened” sets up past-behaviour questions, which people can answer honestly.
• Fixed slots and a written option lower the cost of saying yes. A calendar link (Calendly or similar) works after they agree, not in the first message.

Once they say yes, use the 24 customer discovery questions for the call itself. Keep going until new conversations stop producing new problems, which for one narrow segment usually means eight to fifteen.

Who not to ask

The top Google result for this search is an r/Entrepreneur thread titled “Who do you safely talk to about your business idea?” The poster wanted someone who “doesn’t immediately wheel in a howitzer to blast it full of holes like Swiss cheese.” Most replies named friends, mentors and advisors. Those are the wrong first audience, for different reasons:

• Friends and family are polite. They answer how you feel, not how they behave.
• Other founders are not your buyer, unless you sell to founders. They judge the pitch, not the problem.
• Mentors and accelerators are good at feasibility and fundraising. They cannot tell you whether an office manager in Ohio will switch tools.
• People who already like you filter out the criticism you need.

The most useful reply in that thread skipped opinions entirely:

“Tbh, I recently did that and I got ripped apart. I just used my own money to do a trial run. Got sold out within 3 weeks, everybody is now helping me to make my product better”r/Entrepreneur

Where to get honest feedback

Honest feedback comes from people who owe you nothing, asked about facts rather than feelings. Ranked by how hard it is to fake:

1. Money. A pre-sale, deposit or paid pilot. See testing willingness to pay with a paid pilot.
2. Unprompted complaints and low-star reviews. Written before you existed, for nobody.
3. Past-behaviour interviews with strangers who have the problem. What they did, what it cost, what they tried.
4. Feedback threads and surveys. Useful for clarity, weak for demand.
5. Opinions from friends. Kind, and mostly noise.

The r/founder poster reached the same order after 20+ attempts: “If you properly evaluate the data you have before starting the work, you won’t need to change direction for the 14th time.” For the full sequence from idea to first paying customer, see how to validate a startup idea, score your idea with the free business idea evaluator, and when you are ready to launch, read how to get your first 100 users.

Tools for finding people to talk to

Methodology and data sources

Subreddit rules were fetched from each subreddit’s public rules endpoint and member counts from its public profile on October 9, 2026; we report only what those pages state. BigIdeasDB figures come from read-only SQL on our database, verified the same day. Reddit pain points are grouped by the subreddit they were extracted from; the founder group is the eight founder-focused subreddits named in the table caption. Capterra job titles are grouped by keyword, so a title like “Owner and Bookkeeper” counts as an owner. Quotes are anonymised and attributed to the subreddit only.

What this data cannot tell you: whether a given person will agree to talk, response rates to any message, or how rules are enforced day to day. A higher low-star rate among owners shows who complains in public, not that owners are easier to recruit. Treat the rules table as a starting point and read the live rules before you post.

Frequently asked questions