Micro-SaaS Gold Mining with Trends & Stars

Use Google Trends, Reddit, and GitHub stars to validate Micro-SaaS ideas. Learn a practical, data-driven framework to discover and score profitable niches.

The worst Micro-SaaS ideas all start the same way: “I built this for myself… and nobody else cares.” You ship, tweet, maybe get a few pity signups, and then watch churn eat the curve. The problem usually isn’t your tech skills. It’s that you built from intuition, not from demand.

The good news: we live in a world where people scream their problems into search boxes, comment threads, and GitHub stars all day long. If you treat those streams like data instead of noise, you can mine a steady stream of legitimate Micro-SaaS ideas.

This is the system I wish someone had handed me earlier: Google Trends + Reddit + GitHub stars as a three-signal radar for Micro-SaaS opportunities.

Why Micro-SaaS Needs a Data Radar, Not a “Shower Thought” Micro-SaaS is brutally honest. You don’t have a huge sales team to brute-force distribution. Your idea has to:

solve a real recurring pain
for a small but reachable audience
that hangs out somewhere you can actually reach

Gut instinct is nice, but if you can’t back it with visible demand, you’re gambling. Search trends show what people are trying to learn. Reddit shows what they’re complaining about. GitHub stars show where builders are already investing time. Put those together and you get a surprisingly clear picture: “Is this niche growing, noisy, and underserved enough to build into?”

The Three-Signal Framework Think of each source as a different type of sensor.

+-------------------------+
        |  Micro-SaaS Opportunity |
        +-------------------------+
           ▲           ▲         ▲
           |           |         |
 Google Trends   Reddit posts   GitHub stars
   (search)      (problems)       (builders)

You don’t need perfect data. You just need consistent, comparable signals.

1. Google Trends: Is the wave growing? Google Trends tells you if interest in a topic is:

rising (nice),
cyclical (plan around seasonality), or
decaying (maybe don’t build a brand-new SaaS for fidget spinners).

You might search for:

“open telemetry”
“notion templates”
“home lab monitoring”
“obsidian plugin”

You’re looking for healthy upward or stable lines, not sudden hype spikes that crash a month later. Use Trends to narrow down spaces, not to choose features. It answers: “Will this niche still exist when I finish the MVP?”

2. Reddit: Where are the sharp pains? Reddit is a goldmine of unfiltered pain points. People complain there in a way they never do in polished blog posts. Look for:

Niche subreddits (r/selfhosted, r/devops, r/vuejs, r/Notion)
Repeated questions: “How do you…”, “Is there a tool for…”, “Why is X so bad?”
Long comment chains where people share manual workarounds

Anything that looks like: “I’m manually doing X every week and it sucks” …belongs on your Micro-SaaS radar. You might be wondering, “But isn’t that just anecdotal?” True. That’s why we cross-check with the other two signals.

3. GitHub Stars: Are builders already circling this problem? GitHub stars give you a builder signal: what developers are poking at in their free time.

Patterns to watch:

Tools with fast star growth but rough docs
Repos that are frameworks, not finished products
Libraries that people wrap with their own scripts in issues/PRs

If you find a repo with:

lots of issues that say “How do I use this with X SaaS?”
and no slick hosted solution

…that’s a Micro-SaaS candidate waiting for someone to put a billing page in front.

Architecture: A Lightweight Idea Mining Pipeline You don’t need a “Micro-SaaS AI co-founder platform.” A simple pipeline works:

Topics → Trends → Reddit → GitHub → Scoreboard

Or more concretely:

[Seed Topics]
    |
    v
+-----------+       +---------+
| Google    | ----> | Filter  |
| Trends    |       | by growth
+-----------+       +---------+
    |                    |
    v                    v
+-----------+       +----------+
| Reddit    | ----> | Extract  |
| Threads   |       | pain points
+-----------+       +----------+
    |                    |
    v                    v
+-----------+       +-------------+
| GitHub    | ----> | Validate dev |
| Repos     |       | interest     |
+-----------+       +-------------+
              |
              v
        Idea Scoreboard

Your goal is not to automate everything. It’s to systematize your curiosity so you don’t chase the last tweet that crossed your feed.

A Worked Example: “OpenTelemetry Sidecar Micro-SaaS” Let’s run a hypothetical. Step 1: Seed the topic You’re interested in observability and DevOps. You plug “opentelemetry”, “otel collector”, and “log aggregation” into Google Trends. You see:

“opentelemetry” — strong, steady growth
“otel collector” — slower, but upward
“log aggregation” — flat

Your first guess: maybe something around simplifying OpenTelemetry for small teams. Step 2: Reddit scan You search across r/devops, r/kubernetes, r/selfhosted for:

“opentelemetry setup”
“otel collector docker”
“instrumentation painful”

You find repeated themes:

“It’s too hard to configure exporters correctly.”
“I just want a simple docker-compose setup for my side projects.”
“I don’t want to manage a whole observability stack.”

People are hacking together YAML and one-off scripts. Weirdly few hosted tools target this exact slice. Step 3: GitHub stars You search GitHub for:

“otel collector docker compose”
“simple otel gateway”
“opentelemetry quickstart”

You see a couple of small repos: quickstart scripts with 400–800 stars, issues full of “Can you add X?” and no commercial offering.

Now your Micro-SaaS idea is sharper: A hosted OpenTelemetry sidecar that gives small teams an opinionated, one-command setup, with sensible dashboards and alert presets, priced per project. Even if you don’t build exactly that, you got there through structured signals, not vibes.

A Simple Scoring Sheet To avoid falling in love with the first idea, give each candidate a quick score from 1–5 on three axes:

Trend Score (T): based on Google Trends curve
Pain Score (P): based on number + intensity of Reddit complaints
Builder Score (B): based on GitHub stars + activity

Then:

Idea Score = (2 * P) + T + B

Why double-weight pain? Because people will pay to get rid of painful, boring work faster than they’ll pay for something “interesting.” You’re not doing science here. You’re giving your future self a sanity check.

Optional Automation: A Tiny Data Harvester You can absolutely do all this manually. But if you’re code-inclined, a small script helps.

Below is a conceptual Python snippet (APIs and auth details omitted for brevity) that shows how you might wire things:

from trends import get_trend_score
from reddit import fetch_threads, pain_score
from github import search_repos, builder_score

topics = ["opentelemetry", "notion calendar", "obsidian tasks"]
ideas = []

for topic in topics:
    t_score = get_trend_score(topic)        # 1–5 based on 12–24 month trend

    threads = fetch_threads(topic, subreddits=["devops", "selfhosted"])
    p_score = pain_score(threads)           # 1–5 based on frequency + language

    repos = search_repos(topic)
    b_score = builder_score(repos)          # 1–5 from stars, issues, growth

    total = (2 * p_score) + t_score + b_score

    ideas.append({
        "topic": topic,
        "trend": t_score,
        "pain": p_score,
        "builder": b_score,
        "score": total,
    })

# Print sorted candidates
for idea in sorted(ideas, key=lambda x: x["score"], reverse=True):
    print(idea)

You don’t need this to be perfect. The point is to create a repeatable idea mining ritual you can run monthly.

Common Pitfalls (And How to Dodge Them)

Chasing hype keywords only. A spiky line in Google Trends with zero Reddit discussion is usually a news cycle, not a market.
Ignoring monetization reality. GitHub can show you a hot open source project… whose users expect everything to be free. Make sure your Micro-SaaS adds a hosted, maintenance-saving layer, not just a pretty UI.
Solving for yourself, not the loudest pain. It’s tempting to build in your comfort zone. Listen to where the complaints are loudest, even if it means learning one new stack.

Closing: Turn Curiosity into a Monthly Mining Habit Micro-SaaS is a long game. You don’t need one perfect idea; you need a repeatable way to surface good-enough ideas and kill the bad ones before they eat six months of your life.

Google Trends keeps you on growing waves. Reddit keeps you close to real pain.  GitHub stars keep you aligned with where builders already are. Run this three-signal scan once a month. Save your top 5 ideas into a simple scoreboard. Then, when you’re ready to build, you’ll be choosing from validated options — not whatever popped into your head in the shower. If you try this system — or already use something similar — I’d love to hear what you discover.

👇 Drop a comment with the most surprising niche you’ve found, follow for more practical Micro-SaaS frameworks, or share this with a friend who’s “looking for an idea” but still scrolling Twitter for inspiration.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/@Praxen/micro-saas-gold-mining-with-trends-stars-cec242150576