How to read GitHub issues for product inspiration

Reddit tells you what people feel. GitHub tells you what people need.

These are different things — and for certain markets, GitHub is more valuable. Before you dive in here, make sure you've also covered how to use Reddit for market research — the two sources work best together.

If your idea involves developers, technical teams, DevOps, data engineers, or anyone who uses open source tools in their workflow — GitHub issues are the most honest, specific, and actionable market research you can do. And almost nobody uses them.

What makes GitHub issues different

On Reddit, people describe problems in general terms. "I wish project management tools were simpler." "Why is deployment so complicated."

On GitHub, the same people describe problems in precise technical detail. "When uploading a CSV with more than 10,000 rows and a column containing Unicode characters, the parser fails silently and returns an empty array instead of an error."

That's not a vague frustration. That's a spec.

GitHub issues also have a built-in signal mechanism: reactions. A 👍 on a GitHub issue means "I have this problem too." An issue with 200 thumbs-up reactions is 200 developers saying "fix this, I need it."

Where to look and what to search for

Step 1: Find the relevant repos

Start with the tools your target customer uses.

If you're building for data teams: look at pandas, dbt, Airflow, Prefect, Great Expectations. If you're building for DevOps: look at Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD. If you're building developer tools: look at the frameworks your customers build on.

You want repos with:

• 1,000+ stars (real users, not just enthusiasts)
• Active issue tracker (issues opened in the last 30 days)
• A large number of open issues (signal that the backlog is real)

Step 2: Search for feature requests

In each repo, go to the Issues tab and search for:

• label:enhancement
• label:feature-request
• label:feature
• is:open is:issue sorted by 👍 reactions

Sort by most reacted. The top results are your product brief.

An issue titled "Support for custom authentication providers" with 340 thumbs-up is 340 developers who need that feature. If the maintainer hasn't built it in two years, they probably won't. That's your market.

Step 3: Read the "won't fix" and "closed" issues

Maintainers sometimes close issues as "won't fix" or "out of scope." These are especially interesting.

A maintainer closes a feature request because it doesn't fit the direction of their open source project. That doesn't mean the need doesn't exist. It means the need exists but won't be served by this tool.

That's your SaaS. The thing the open source project explicitly won't do.

Step 4: Look at abandoned repos

Search GitHub for tools in your space that are 2-4 years old and no longer maintained. Look at their issues.

An abandoned tool with 500 stars and 80 open issues from 3 years ago tells you: people wanted this, someone tried to build it, it didn't survive as open source. The demand is still there. A paid SaaS model might sustain what a volunteer project couldn't.

Reading between the lines

GitHub issues have patterns worth learning to read:

High reactions + old age + still open: The maintainer can't or won't fix it. The user need is persistent and unmet. If this is a common pattern across multiple repos in a category, it's a reliable signal of market demand.

Duplicates: When people file the same issue multiple times because they didn't find the original — that's a sign the problem is widespread enough that strangers are independently hitting it.

Long comment threads: An issue with 40 comments usually contains the full user research you need. People describe their workarounds, their constraints, what they've already tried. The comment thread is a focus group.

"I'd pay for this" comments: Rare but significant. When a developer says "I would pay for a hosted version of this that handles X" — that's a direct statement of willingness to pay. Search for these explicitly: "would pay" within issue comments.

A real example of what this looks like

Imagine you're exploring ideas for developer productivity tooling.

You search GitHub for "CI/CD" related repos. You find a popular open source deployment tool with 8,000 stars and 340 open issues.

You filter by most reacted. The top issue: "Support for parallel deployment pipelines" — 287 reactions, opened 18 months ago, still open. Maintainer commented once saying it's architecturally complex and not on the immediate roadmap.

You read the comments. 40 replies. Developers describing how they work around it (manually sequencing deployments, running jobs twice). One person says "I'd honestly pay €100/month for a hosted version that just handled parallel pipelines."

You now have:

• Confirmed demand (287 reactions)
• Confirmed workarounds (people are suffering enough to hack solutions)
• Confirmed willingness to pay (someone said the number out loud)
• A clear feature requirement
• A reason the incumbent won't fix it soon

That's a product brief. It came from one hour of reading GitHub issues. The next step is confirming those people will actually pay — see how to find out if people will pay for your idea.

What GitHub can't tell you

GitHub skews toward technical users who are comfortable filing issues. If your market is non-technical (small business owners, marketers, designers), GitHub will underrepresent them.

GitHub also skews toward people already using existing tools. If you're building for a market that doesn't currently use software for a workflow — GitHub won't surface that demand.

For non-technical markets, use Reddit and review sites instead. For technical markets, GitHub is irreplaceable.

Combining GitHub with Reddit

The most complete picture comes from both:

• GitHub tells you the precise technical gap
• Reddit tells you the emotional experience of that gap

A developer on GitHub files a precise bug report. The same developer on Reddit says "I've been fighting this for two weeks, it's blocking our entire deployment pipeline, maintainer hasn't responded."

The GitHub issue gives you the spec. The Reddit post gives you the urgency. Together, they give you the product and the positioning. For a systematic approach to mining both sources, how to find your target customer's biggest complaints online covers the full complaint mapping process.

Check your idea against live GitHub signals →