Turn Reddit and Hacker News complaints into a ranked bug list
Users report bugs in public long before they email support. Here's how to find those posts, group them and decide what to fix first.
The Heardex team · · 6 min read
When something breaks in your product, the first report is rarely a support ticket. It's a Reddit comment asking whether anyone else has the problem, a Hacker News reply mentioning that your export “still falls over”, a one-star App Store review, or a GitHub issue on a project that depends on you. By the time it reaches your inbox, many more people have hit it and said nothing to you.
This guide shows how to collect those posts, group them into issues and rank them, by hand first and then with Heardex.
1. Search where your users already talk
Start with the places people go when something doesn't work:
- Reddit: the subreddit for your category, and posts where people compare tools.
- Hacker News: launch threads and “Ask HN” posts where your product comes up.
- GitHub: issues in projects that integrate with yours.
- Stack Overflow: questions about your API or SDK.
- App store reviews: the most direct bug reports you'll get, and the least read.
Search for your product's name, its short forms and common misspellings. If your name is a common word, add context: your domain, or words that only appear next to your product.
2. Keep only what's about you
A product called “Notes” matches every post about notes. Before anything else, throw out posts that aren't about your product. It's tedious but it decides whether the rest is useful.
3. Sort each post
Give each remaining post a category. A small set is enough:
- Bug, performance problem or security concern
- Feature request
- Complaint about usability or pricing
- Question, praise, or comparison with a competitor
4. Group posts about the same problem
Ten people describe the same crash in ten ways: “export freezes”, “PDF never finishes”, “lost my work saving a long doc”. Group them into one issue and keep every post behind it. The count of distinct people is the most useful number you'll have.
5. Rank by evidence, not by volume of noise
Rank issues on things you can measure:
- Reach: how many different people reported it.
- Trend: is it growing this week compared with the last few?
- Recurrence: does it keep coming back after you thought it was fixed?
Severity and which part of the product it touches matter too, but they're judgement calls. Keep them separate from the measured facts so you know which is which.
Doing it with Heardex
Heardex does these steps continuously. Add your product and keywords, and it searches Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, app store reviews and more, checks each post is about your product, classifies it and groups similar posts into issues. Issues are ranked from reach, trend and recurrence, with the AI's inferences shown apart. See Feedback intelligence and how issues are ranked.
From an issue, “Investigate with Claude” hands it to your own Claude, which reads every report and looks for the cause in your code. That's the step from “people are complaining” to “here's the line that breaks”.
A weekly habit
Whatever tools you use, look at the list once a week: what's new, what's growing, what came back. Fix the top one, reply to the people who reported it, and mark it resolved. Public bug reports are a gift: people telling you exactly what to fix, for free.