What's the most savvy way to look for painkiller ideas?

Savvy, maybe not. But asking an audience is often overlooked.

. Currently I know 4 ways to find problems worth solving: 1. Identify current challenges: Note down the problems you face while building or tinkering (e.g. Marc Louvion built Shipfast because he wanted to ship products in days, not weeks). 2. Observe recurring issues: Look at problems people share repeatedly (e.g. Indie makers were sharing Stripe banned screenshots over X, so again Marc built ByeDispute. Although it might be possible that he might have built it when he was banned). 3. Improve existing products: Build a better version of existing products (recently, many indie makers launched boilerplates, so Ulric Musset is building a code generation platform where you can build an app in minutes, not days). 4. Explore low competition areas: Build something where competition is low, and there is a chance for improvement (e.g. there are 500+ AI directories, but there are around 10+ directory submission services, so we launched BoringLaunch as a productized service)

Listen from target audience directly - you can start with Yourself / your friends and family for the issues that they are currently facing then work backwards and see the market scope and competitors for the same.