Discovery Lab

The Discovery Lab is OpinionDeck’s on-demand research tool. You enter a query and get back a ranked list of relevant Reddit and Hacker News threads, scored by engagement and intent signals.

Search modes

Competitor Discovery

Enter a competitor’s product name (e.g. Linear, Superhuman, Calendly). OpinionDeck searches for:

• Direct mentions and reviews
• Frustration threads (“X is terrible because…”)
• Alternative-seeking posts (“looking for something better than X”)
• Head-to-head comparisons (“X vs Y”)

Idea Discovery

Enter a product idea or market description (e.g. async standup tool for remote teams). OpinionDeck:

1. Generates multiple search angles using AI (e.g. “remote standup problems”, “standup alternative”, “daily sync tool frustration”)
2. Runs all angles in parallel across Reddit and HN
3. Aggregates and deduplicates the results

Free plan note: On the free plan, idea discovery generates 1 search angle. Paid plans generate up to 3 angles for broader coverage.

URL / Website Input

Paste a product URL (e.g. https://notion.so). OpinionDeck extracts the product name from the URL and runs competitor discovery automatically.

AI Brain

Toggle AI Brain on to enable query expansion. With AI Brain active:

• Your single query is expanded into multiple semantically related searches
• Results cover adjacent pain points and use cases you may not have thought of
• Takes slightly longer (3–8 seconds) but returns significantly more coverage

Leave AI Brain off for fast, targeted searches on a specific term.

Platform filtering

Use the platform filter to restrict results to a specific source:

Understanding results

Each result card shows:

Intent markers

OpinionDeck tags each result with one or more intent signals:

Posts tagged frustration or alternative are your highest-priority leads — they represent users who are actively looking to switch.

Engagement metrics

• Score — Reddit upvote count (proxy for visibility and resonance)
• Comments — Discussion volume (high comments often signal strong opinions)

Saving results to a Research Deck

1. Check the results you want to keep
2. Click Save to Deck
3. Choose an existing Deck or create a new one

OpinionDeck downloads the full thread (post body + all comments up to your plan’s comment depth limit) and queues it for AI analysis.

Comment depth: Free plan fetches up to 50 comments. Professional plan fetches up to 5,000 comments per thread, giving the analysis engine much more signal to work with.

Discovery history

Every search is automatically saved to your history. From the Discovery Lab:

• Click History to view past searches
• Re-open any past search to see its cached results instantly (no re-querying)
• Delete individual history entries you no longer need

Search history retention (how long past searches remain accessible in the history panel):

Note: This controls your search history panel only. PDF/JSON export retention is separate — see Pricing →.

Discovery limits

Monthly discovery limits reset at the start of each billing cycle.

A “discovery” counts as one submitted search (regardless of how many results come back).

Data sources

Discovery searches across:

1. Reddit live API — Current posts and comments, rate limited, real-time
2. Hacker News (Algolia) — Full-text search across all stories and comments
3. Arctic Shift — Historical Reddit archive for older posts (Professional+ plans)
4. PullPush.io — Secondary Reddit archive, used as a fallback for author enrichment

When the live Reddit API returns no results, OpinionDeck automatically falls back to the historical archive for the same query.