Audience analysis using Reddit: A step-by-step guide with an example

"I've sent 47 cold outreach messages this week trying to land customer interviews. Two people replied. Neither had time to talk."

Sound familiar? That's why we're building a better research system:

• In part 1, we mapped Reddit's hidden network to find exactly where your target customers hang out (using community maps to discover connected subreddits)
• Then in part 2, we learned how to spot what your audience truly cares about (by finding those raw, emotional 2 AM posts where people share their real struggles)

Now it's time for the deep dive: how to extract months of customer insights from these conversations in a single afternoon.

You'll learn:

• A systematic process for analyzing Reddit conversations to understand your audience
• How to extract six key types of customer insights without ever talking to anyone
• A detailed example showing how to apply this process
• A 30-minute exercise you can use immediately to gather insights about your market

Why Reddit beats traditional customer research methods

Traditional customer research has three big problems:

1. You only hear from people willing to talk to you
2. People's memories of their problems are filtered through hindsight (it takes some skill to actually get the truth about their journey)
3. You're limited by who you can reach through cold outreach

Reddit solves these problems in unique ways:

• You catch people in their actual moment of pain, not retrospective accounts
• Posts often capture the raw "help me!" moment in a buyer's journey
• The platform's anonymous nature encourages vulnerable, honest sharing
• Natural discussion threads reveal follow-up questions and deeper context
• The voting system helps surface which problems and experiences resonate most with the community

But Reddit's real power goes beyond these obvious benefits. You also get:

• Historical data showing how problems evolve over time
• The ability to follow keyword trails from one thread to discover related problems and discussions (helps you validate real needs)
• Access to niche communities you wouldn’t find easily through traditional networking

A detailed example: The step-by-step process for audience analysis

Let's analyze this post from r/startups:

Full post here

Step 1: First Read-Through

Before diving deep into analysis, evaluate if a thread contains rich language that’s worth your time analyzing.

Let's apply these criteria to our example post.

Surface-level signals:

• 23 points with 97% upvotes - indicating strong resonance with the audience in question
• 32 comments, mostly offering support and sharing experiences
• Multiple detailed responses from the author, showing engagement

But the real value lies deeper. Notice how this founder's frustration sparked a discussion that revealed common patterns in early-stage startups.

Scan for valuable elements:

• Raw emotional language ("burning me out," "frozen," "beating myself up") - capturing the founder's state of mind whilst trying to get the job done
• Specific context that gives shape to the problem ("tech background," "healthcare-related," "unemployed and working full-time")
• Multiple failed solutions ("LinkedIn messaging," "reddit forums," "offering it free")
• Clear pain points that reveal barriers to making tangible progress ("people in the industry are just overworked and don’t have time nor motivation to try out my solution")

What makes this post particularly valuable is how it captures a crucial moment in the customer discovery journey - when a technical founder realizes that building the product was the easy part. The real challenge lies in getting meaningful engagement from their target audience.

Let's break it down further.

Step 2: Identifying Context

Context reveals crucial details about who's experiencing the problem and what constraints they're operating under. In this post, we can piece together a detailed picture.

Examining our post through this lens, several key contextual elements emerge.

Background & Skills:

"I have a tech background and have blasted through building an MVP/prototype..."

This reveals someone who can build quickly but might be overconfident about the technical side being the main challenge.

Market & Industry:

"My idea is healthcare-related"
"I get the impression that many people in the industry are just overworked"

These comments identify the target market and reveal the founder's assumptions about market dynamics.

Current Situation:

"I am currently unemployed and working on this full time"
"it took about 5 weeks"

This context helps explain both the rapid development timeline and the growing frustration with slow market feedback.

What makes this context particularly valuable is how it represents a common founder archetype: the technical solo founder trying to break into their target audience’s industry/domain. Their situation shapes both their advantages (fast development) and blind spots (understanding how to get meaningful feedback from busy professionals).

Step 3: Spotting Pain Points

Problems are universal, but pain points are personal. While many founders struggle to get customer feedback, what matters is how that struggle affects different people emotionally. These emotional reactions - the 2 AM worries, the stories people tell themselves - reveal what actually drives decisions and behavior.

Understanding pain points is crucial because they determine whether someone will actually adopt your solution. A problem might be real, but if it doesn't cause enough personal pain, people won't prioritize solving it. (For a deeper exploration of this concept, see why pain points drive decisions more than problems do.)

Our post shows three distinct layers of pain.

Functional Pain:

• Stuckness: "Now I feel like I am frozen" - revealing the paralysis that comes when technical skills can't solve a market problem
• Inefficiency: "75% of the time people respond positively (if they reply)" - showing how even "good" response rates can mask a deeper problem
• Insufficiency: "haven't received any feedback yet" - highlighting the gap between polite interest and actual engagement

These functional pains reveal a fundamental mismatch between the founder's current approach and their desired outcomes. The symptoms point to a deeper problem: despite following common startup advice (direct outreach, free trials), they're not getting the engagement they need to validate their solution.

Emotional Pain:

• Burnout: "burning me out" - the toll of pushing against market resistance
• Doubt: "beating myself up" - questioning not just the approach, but the entire venture
• Helplessness: "the lack of traction... has been way more frustrating than I expected" - the jarring shift from technical certainty to market uncertainty

These emotional pains reveal why the founder might abandon the project entirely - not because the problem isn't real, but because the validation process itself becomes too painful.

Social Pain:

• Status anxiety: "basically saying 'hey, I made a thing, please can you try it for me'" - the founder's language reveals discomfort with appearing amateur when approaching potential users

This social dimension matters because it shows how the founder's perceived status might affect their ability to engage effectively with healthcare professionals.

Step 4: Understanding Current Attempts

Analyzing what people have already tried reveals both market gaps and hidden adoption barriers.

Looking at our founder's attempts and their results…

What They've Tried:

"I have been reaching out to people via LinkedIn private messaging and reddit forums"

"A handful of people have reached out asking to try it free of charge"

Results So Far:

"75% of the time people respond positively (if they reply)"

"haven't received any feedback yet"

Despite getting some positive responses, these attempts haven't led to meaningful engagement or feedback. The founder has tried both direct outreach and offering free access, but is struggling to convert initial interest into actual usage.

The gap between polite responses and actual engagement suggests there might be barriers or friction points the founder hasn't identified yet. This could be valuable information for understanding what's actually needed to get meaningful user feedback.

Step 5: Finding Desired Outcomes

Desired outcomes reveal the gap between current reality and aspirations.

In this post, we can identify two levels of outcomes.

Explicitly Stated Outcomes:

"I'm trying to build interest"

"haven't received any feedback yet"

"get traction"

These direct statements show the founder's immediate needs: market validation and user engagement. Coming from someone who felt "total control" during the building phase, these outcomes reflect their struggle to transition from technical execution to market acceptance.

Implicit Desired Outcomes:

"Something they can't ignore"

"build something that people want to use right now"

Reading between the lines reveals deeper desires:

• Recognition from healthcare professionals (moving beyond being seen as just another tech person with an idea)
• Product validation without feeling like they're begging for attention ("basically saying 'hey, I made a thing, please can you try it for me'")
• Regaining the sense of progress and control they felt during development
• Finding a way to overcome the "overworked" nature of their target users

The contrast between explicit and implicit outcomes is telling: while explicitly seeking tactical wins like feedback and traction, the founder implicitly desires transformation - from someone asking for favors to someone offering an essential solution. This reflects the broader journey from technical founder to healthcare innovator.

Step 6: Uncovering Worldviews/Beliefs

Worldviews are the fundamental assumptions and beliefs people use to make sense of their experiences. They're the often unspoken "truths" that shape how someone interprets events, makes decisions, and approaches problems. Think of them as the lens through which people view reality.

These mental models are crucial because they drive decision-making more than facts do. People don't act on reality—they act on their perception of reality. Understanding these mental models helps you:

• Predict how people will respond to your solution
• Identify hidden barriers to adoption
• Craft messaging that resonates at a deeper level
• Challenge incorrect assumptions that block progress

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In this post, we see several beliefs shaping the founder's decisions.

About the Market:

"I get the impression that many people in the industry are just overworked"

The founder has created a story that lack of feedback equals lack of time. This belief might be preventing them from considering other possibilities - maybe the solution isn't compelling enough, or maybe they're not reaching the right people.

About Product Development:

"it would be foolish to scale a product that hasn't been validated, no?"

The founder believes in a strict "validate first, scale second" approach. This mental model comes from startup best practices, but might not match how the target audience actually adopts new solutions.

About Value Proposition:

"75% of the time people respond positively"

"they need an incentive"

The founder interprets polite responses as validation and believes adding incentives will bridge the gap to actual usage. This worldview assumes the core offering is solid and just needs the right wrapper to succeed.

The power of understanding these worldviews becomes clear when we see how they shape behavior: This founder's belief that "healthcare professionals are just too busy" leads them to focus on incentives rather than questioning their core value proposition. Their belief in the "validate first" model might be preventing them from seeing alternative paths to market entry that work better in healthcare.

These beliefs form a coherent worldview: that healthcare professionals would use the solution if they just had more time and proper incentives. This mental model might be true - or it might be preventing the founder from seeing other important factors in the adoption decision.

Your next step: Collect raw evidence

Here's your 30-minute challenge for today:

1. Find one emotionally charged post in your target subreddit (search for terms that involve the task you’re trying to solve. Use my Reddit Search tool for this and look for emotionally charged words in the titles.)
2. Set a timer for 25 minutes
3. Create six sections in your notes app, then copy and paste relevant quotes from the post (copy them directly, don’t synthesize):

• Context quotes (5 min): Copy any text that describes who they are and their situation. Ask yourself what’s pushing them
• Pain point quotes (5 min): Copy expressions of frustration, difficulty, or challenges. It helps to think through functional, emotional and social pain dimensions
• Attempt quotes (5 min): Copy descriptions of what they've already tried and what they’re considering
• Desired outcome quotes (4 min): Copy statements about what they want to achieve
• Worldview quotes (4 min): Copy statements that reveal how they think things work

4. Spend the final 5 minutes marking the quotes that surprised you most
5. Do a quick synthesis and ask yourself “Why is this here?” and “Why are people reacting to this?”

In part 4 of this series, we'll explore how to transform these insights into practical product and marketing decisions.

But don't wait - the sooner you start analyzing real conversations, the sooner you'll spot the patterns that matter for your business.

Quick note: This systematic approach to mining customer insights wouldn't be possible without two game-changing methodologies: Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman's Sales Safari (studying customers "in the wild") and Bob Moesta's Jobs-to-be-Done framework (understanding what actually drives decisions). Check out their work if you want to go deeper.