2 builders who never spoke to each other

Mine competitor reviews for the gap

The public review pages for your category are a written record of what buyers value and what they have given up asking for. Recurring complaints that nobody has fixed mark the opening, and the recency of fresh reviews tells you whether people are still arriving through that keyword at all.

The method

1. 01

   Mine the review sites where your category is already rated, reading both the praise and the complaints, to find what a newcomer can beat.

2. 02

   Read the negative reviews on competing apps and note the recurring words, because a pile of unfixed complaints is the gap a newcomer can enter through.

3. 03

   Read the conversations for what buyers already tried and what is still broken after they paid, because the gap left by existing solutions is the opening for yours.

4. 04

   Judge whether a marketplace niche is alive by how fast incumbent apps are collecting fresh reviews, because a new review means someone searched, installed and liked it recently.

5. 05

   Open every category and sub-category page of the marketplace you plan to sell on, so you finish with a map of which problems merchants actually pay to fix.

What it returned

• Review sites such as G2Crowd and Capterra, plus public forums, are named as where to read what customers of the existing tools say.

• Competitor research tracked which terms recurred in positive versus negative reviews, and whether the negatives were numerous enough to leave room for a better product.

• Recency of competitor reviews was used as the proxy for whether new users were still arriving through that keyword.

• Every page of the Shopify app store was visited, category by category, before any idea was narrowed down.

Sources

• The Counterintuitive Approach to Uncovering Your Profitable NicheJustin Welsh · justinwelsh.me · 2. Immerse Yourself in Conversations · 2024-06-08
• 42 Questions to Ask Before Starting a BusinessPreetam Nath · preetamnath.com · Who are my competitors? How do I beat them? · 2021-01-10
• How I grew my Shopify micro SaaS to 2000+ users in 40 daysPreetam Nath · preetamnath.com · Uncovering opportunities on Shopify · 2019-12-29