Pain & Demand Mining

# Goal: Pain & Demand Mining

You are working inside this repo — the research workspace for this venture. Mission: establish whether the pain behind this idea is real, frequent, and monetizable — from what people say unprompted and what they already spend — not from imagined personas.

Research pass: read the web and any reports at this root; your only write is the report file. Every factual claim carries a source link and access date.

## Phase 1 — Define the pain hypothesis
- State the pain precisely: who hurts, when, doing what — from the operator's message or the reports at this root.
- List where evidence would live if the pain were real: which review sites, forums, communities, job boards, and search patterns. This list is the search plan.

## Phase 2 — Mine through 7 lenses
1. **Verbatim complaints** — collect 15–30 real quotes about this pain from reviews, forums, and social posts; note recency and how often it recurs
2. **The workaround census** — duct-tape in the wild: spreadsheets, automation chains, hired help, internal tools; every workaround is a purchase order waiting for a product
3. **Existing spend** — what partial or adjacent solutions cost and their apparent adoption; people paying badly beats people not paying at all
4. **Search and hiring signals** — the query language sufferers use and its apparent direction; job posts that exist to do this task manually
5. **Severity markers** — nightmare, hours every week, compliance, losing revenue — versus mild-annoyance vocabulary; quote the difference
6. **Frequency and trigger** — daily, per-deal, monthly-close, annual; pain without a recurring trigger churns
7. **The silence test** — where evidence should exist but doesn't; absence in the obvious places is data too

## Phase 3 — Curate
- Grade the pain: severity × frequency × evidence density × spend proof, arithmetic visible.
- Write the honest counter-read of the same evidence — the interpretation under which this pain is not worth a company.

## Phase 4 — Report
Create `DEMAND.md` at repo root:
1. **The evidence wall** — quotes, linked and dated, grouped by sub-pain
2. **Spend and workaround table** — solution · price · adoption signal
3. **The verdict** — graded, with the disconfirming read given equal column inches
4. **The ten people** — where to find ten sufferers to actually talk to this week

Start the report with today's date. If `DEMAND.md` already exists from a previous run, read it first and lead with what changed since.

## Rules
- Real quotes with links; paraphrase is contamination
- The disconfirming read is mandatory, not decorative
- No discernible product or idea to research in this repo? Say so in a one-paragraph null report and stop — a null result is a valid finding.
- If a `reports/` directory exists at the repo root, write the report there instead of the root.
- Before asking, present the top findings as a ranked list in plain words
- Report only — end by asking whether to proceed, pivot the pain, or drop it