Column · complaint or market
A complaint costs nothing to make and can be made to anyone. It requires no commitment, no change of behaviour and no payment. It is therefore abundant, and abundance makes it a poor signal.
Three conditions together: the person has the problem now, they have already tried something, and the something cost them time or money. The third condition is the one that separates talk from trade.
Look for the workaround. People who are serious about a problem build a clumsy solution: a spreadsheet, a folder of screenshots, a weekly manual routine. The workaround is the evidence, and its clumsiness is the opportunity.
Complaints are useful for vocabulary, not for validation. They tell you how people describe the problem in their own words — which is exactly what a page needs to say if it wants to be found.
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