Stop guessing which problem to solve.

Loam reads where people complain in public, groups the same pain wherever it appears, and hands you one brief at a time, with a verdict, the case against, and every claim linked to a person who actually said it.

Today's brief

Teams self-hosting Postgres have no reliable way to know whether their backups actually restore

Worth a weekend, spent talking to people, not building.
The pain is proven. The payment is not. Two conversations settle it.
“Two years of nightly backups. All of them worthless.”
Hacker News · 412 points · one of 142 signals behind this brief
ALREADY SERVEDBUILD ITNOISEREAL, UNPROVENEVIDENCE THEY WILL PAYEVIDENCE THE PAIN IS REAL
The problem with finding problems

Three ways founders pick ideas. All of them lose years.

Scrolling communities

You read a hundred threads and remember the loudest one. Whatever you saw most recently feels like the biggest market, and you have no way to tell a real pattern from a busy week.

AI idea generators

A paragraph of confident prose with nothing underneath it. No source, no evidence, no way to check whether a single human has ever had the problem it describes.

Your own frustrations

The most common starting point, and the one most likely to be a market of one. By the time you find out, you have spent six months and become too attached to stop.

How it works

Three steps, in the order they actually happen.

Loam is built around one belief: the expensive mistake is not picking a bad idea, it is failing to rule one out quickly.

1Discover

One brief at a time

No feed, no list to rank. A single problem with a verdict, and the next one only arrives once you have decided on this one.

2Decide

Save it or kill it

Everything you keep lands on a board where a card only moves when something outside your own head moves it. Reading more is not progress.

3Validate

Talk to people, honestly

Interview questions written so nobody can be polite at you, and an AI that listens to the recordings and tells you what you actually heard.

Evidence, not vibes

Every claim carries a person behind it.

A brief cannot say a problem is painful without pointing at someone who said so. If the evidence is thin, the brief says so and refuses to have an opinion, which is the part that makes the confident ones worth trusting.

Links, dates and vote counts on every quote
Scored from raw counts, never the model's own confidence
Thin coverage stated plainly instead of padded
“We had nightly dumps for two years. When we finally needed one, the restore died on a large object that had been silently truncated.”
Hacker News · 412 points · March 2026
“There is no way to confirm a backup is good short of restoring it yourself, and we do not have capacity to do that monthly.”
Review site · 2 of 5 stars · February 2026
2025Volume roughly doubled2026
What Loam heardThey were being polite

You described the product at 4:12. Everything after that is compliments, not data, so I am only counting the first four minutes.

2:40“We lose about a day a month to this”: a cost, unprompted
4:12You pitched. Everything after is compromised.
9:05“Yeah, I'd definitely use that”: politeness, not a signal
The part nobody else does

Upload the call. Find out what really happened.

You are the worst possible judge of your own customer interviews. You hear encouragement because you want to. Loam listens to the recording, marks the exact second you started pitching, separates real signals from politeness, and tells you which of your assumptions actually moved.

It will also tell you when the honest answer is that the idea is dead. That is the whole point.

Where it reads

Places where people complain in public, on purpose.

Public, permanent places, the kind people go back to and search years later.

Hacker News
Ask HN threads, where people describe a broken workflow in detail
GitHub Issues
Complaints attached to real software, with reactions as a vote
Stack Exchange
Questions with no good answer, asked repeatedly over years
Review sites
Two-star reviews: what people already pay for and still hate
Honestly compared

What Loam is not.

Not an idea generator

Loam never invents a problem. Everything it shows you was written by a person who was annoyed enough to post about it.

Not a keyword search tool

You are not given a firehose to filter yourself. The work of grouping thousands of complaints into one problem is the product.

Not a builder

Loam stops where the code starts. It gets you to a decision you can defend, then hands you back your weekend.

Questions

Before you start.

Will everyone see the same problems?

The pool is shared, the briefs are not. What reaches you is filtered by what you can build and who you want to sell to, and the reasoning is written for you specifically.

Why only one brief a day on the free plan?

Because volume is the enemy here. Seven problems you actually consider beat fifty you skim. The paid plan raises it to five a day, and most people find that is more than they need.

Is my interview recording private?

By default, yes. A recording is processed for your analysis, never shown to another account, and deletable with its transcript at any time. Contributing recordings to improve Loam is a separate switch in settings that is off unless you turn it on, and it needs the consent of everyone on the call.

What if there is nothing good in my field?

Then Loam says so rather than filling the queue. Thin coverage is stated in the interface, and you can ask for a source to be added for a domain nobody covers yet.

Can I cancel?

Any time, and you drop back to the free plan keeping everything you saved. Nothing you have built up is held hostage.

The next six months are going to something. Make it something real.

Tell Loam what you can build and who you would rather sell to. The first brief lands the same day.

Start free