Pain intelligence
Your market has already written your positioning.
Every competitor you have is sitting on a pile of public reviews. Every buyer you want is complaining in a forum somewhere. A Pain Dossier reads all of it, ranks what comes up most, and gives you the exact sentences — with a link back to each one.
Definition
Not a word cloud. A sourced document.
Sentiment tools tell you 68% of reviews are negative, which is worth nothing on a sales call. A dossier tells you which eleven things people are angry about, in what proportion, about whom, and in whose words.
Ranked themes
Complaints clustered by meaning, not keyword, then ranked by how often they come up, how angry the wording is and how recent it is. Eleven themes is typical for a market; the top three do the work.
Verbatim quote bank
The actual sentences people wrote, never paraphrased and never smoothed out, each one carrying its source URL and the date it was posted. If you cite it, you can click it first.
Competitor attribution
Every complaint is tied to the product it is about, so you know which theme is a market-wide failure and which is one incumbent’s problem you can take business from.
Provenance
Two piles of public writing
Nothing here is scraped from behind a login, bought from a data broker, or inferred by a model. If it is in the dossier, somebody published it and we kept the link.
Competitor reviews
Public reviews of the competitors resolved during onboarding — including the two-star ones nobody in that company reads.
- G2
- Capterra
- Trustpilot
- Clutch
- App stores
Communities
The places your buyers complain when they are not filling in a review form, which is where the honest wording lives.
- Hacker News
- Discourse forums
- X
- 01collect
Pull reviews and threads for every named competitor. No LLM — this step is a fetcher.
- 02dedupe
Content-hash the quotes, normalise, embed with pgvector. The same rant reposted twice counts once.
- 03cluster
Group by meaning so “I can’t show this to a client” and “unreadable to non-technical people” land in one theme.
- 04rank
Frequency × severity × recency, attributed to a competitor, with representative verbatims picked per theme.
Only the last two steps use a model. Collection and deduplication are ordinary code, which is why a dossier costs roughly three dollars to produce and can be amortised across every draft in the segment.
Worked example
UK & US SEO agencies, 5–50 staff
One real segment, mined once. This is the artefact — competitor names redacted here because it is a public sample; in your workspace they are named.
Pain Dossier · UK & US SEO agencies
Refreshed 3 Jul 2026
340
competitor reviews
6 mo
of r/SEO + r/bigseo
4
competitors covered
11
themes · top 3 shown
Reports nobody can read
+7 vs June“Technically correct and completely unreadable to my client. I rebuild the whole thing in Sheets every month before I can send it.”
Per-keyword pricing punishes growth
+2 vs June“We got charged more for succeeding. That is a strange incentive to write into a contract.”
No AI-search coverage
new since April“It tracks Google beautifully and ChatGPT not at all. Half my clients only ask about the second one now.”
Also surfaced
- 12×Onboarding took six weeks
- 9×Support answers in 48 hours, not four
- 7×Numbers disagree with Search Console
- 5×Cancelling requires emailing a person
Switching triggers · active churn intent
“We are migrating off it in Q3 when the contract ends — I just need something that reports in English.”
r/SEO · 18 Jun 2026
“Anyone got a recommendation? Renewal is in six weeks and I am not signing again.”
r/bigseo · 2 Jul 2026
Every quote above is stored with its full URL. Nothing is ever cited in an email that you cannot open and read in context first.
Refresh
A dossier is a subscription, not a PDF
Markets move. The dossier re-mines every month and shows you the difference, because a theme going from six mentions to nineteen in one quarter is the most valuable line in the document.
- Re-mined monthly, with the corpus growing rather than being replaced
- New themes flagged the month they appear
- Rising and falling counts shown against the previous run
- Quotes never rewritten — a quote from March stays exactly as it was written in March
Diff · June → July 2026
- new19×
No AI-search coverage
6× in April
- up41×
Reports nobody can read
34× in June
- flat28×
Per-keyword pricing punishes growth
26× in June
- down12×
Onboarding took six weeks
16× in June
Standalone value
Worth buying if you never send an email
This is the honest test of the thing. A founder who learns that forty-one people publicly called their biggest competitor’s reports unreadable has received something real, whether or not they ever run a campaign.
Your homepage headline
Stop guessing at the words. Forty-one people already wrote the promise you should be making.
The first ninety seconds of a sales call
Open with the complaint they recognise rather than the feature you like.
Roadmap order
A theme rising from six to nineteen mentions in one quarter is a market moving, not a feature request.
Content briefs
Each theme is an article someone is already searching for, in the phrasing they searched with.
Deciding not to build
A market whose only complaint is price is telling you something you would rather hear now.
And when it comes back empty
Some markets leave no public trace: no reviewable competitors, no forums, no threads. We say so plainly instead of selling you a seat — outbound is the wrong channel for you, and finding that out in week one is worth more than the subscription.
Downstream
Then it does the second job
The dossier says what the market hates. The signal engine says what is true about one company today. A draft is only allowed to exist where those two meet.
Market pain · from the dossier
41 agencies publicly said their reporting tool produces something they cannot put in front of a client.
Company fact · from the signal engine
This agency is still running that tool’s widget on their /reports page, found on 22 July 2026.
Then a person reads it
The draft that joins those two lands in a batch of fifty with both sources attached. You approve it, edit it, or throw it away.
$49/mo
Dossier plan
One market, mined monthly, with the verbatim quote bank, competitor attribution and the month-over-month diff. No outreach commitment and no seat count — add sending later, or never.
See all plansGet your market's dossier.
Tell us your product. We resolve your competitors, mine their public reviews and the forums your buyers post in, and send back the ranked themes with the quotes and the links.
Free · no card · yours to keep