What 1,286 creators asked when they didn’t know what to post
We read 2,374 posts from the places creators and small businesses go to ask for help. 1,286 were written by someone with the problem, rather than someone selling an answer. We sorted each one by what it was stuck on.
The biggest single problem is the next post
402 of the 1,286 asked some version of what to post next. That is 31.7%, from 387 different people. The next largest was getting found through keywords and search, at 242. Not understanding the algorithm came third, at 171.
Most of it has nothing to do with the niche
605 observations could not be tied to any niche at all. The question reads the same whoever asks it. The problem most concentrated in named niches was keywords and search.
The sharpest problem is a small one
Knowing what actually worked came up only 63 times, 5.1% of the posts. But 17.5% of those described a workaround the person had already tried and given up on, the highest rate of any of the 13.
What we could not find
Prices. Across all 2,374 posts, people named the price of a creator tool subscription three times. So this tells you what creators are stuck on. It does not tell you what they would pay to be unstuck.
435 of the 1,286 matched none of the 13 problems. We count them rather than leave them out, because a set of codes that explains every post has stopped measuring anything.
How we counted
The posts were published between 13 September 2023 and 6 September 2026: 1,249 of the asking posts from Reddit, 28 from Hacker News and 9 from dev.to. Each post was sorted by its title into asking, telling or unclear, so advice threads did not count as problems. Every asking post was then matched against 13 problems, each with a written definition and the phrases that trigger it.
This is the problem our products are built around: one page for one niche that says what to post next, with every idea tied to the post it came from.
Director Lite runs the same method on your own assistant. It reads the web as text, so it cannot see covers.
Where the numbers come from
- Creator demand corpus: 2,374 posts collected and coded, . Kept in our research records as creator-demand-2026-09-06. Write to [email protected] for the table.
Free, one niche per email
Get a run on your niche when the Director opens
One page for your niche: posts that work in other niches, redrawn for yours with the original beside each one. Runs go out in the order people confirm.