A sourdough tracking app doing $1,500/mo - the niche is the strategy

Strong reminder that niche depth beats market size for tiny indie apps. I'm building a tiny Captio-style iOS memo app for a very narrow cohort — ex-Captio users who never found a clean replacement after that service shut down — and search volume is laughably small, but conversion from one well-worded subreddit thread is wildly higher than anything I tried in broad "productivity" threads. The hidden compounder I keep noticing: in a real niche, feature requests come back in the right vocabulary — people literally name the workflow they want, so prioritization is half-decided for me. The sourdough crowd probably files bugs the same way. Curious — when you first spotted this niche, what was your fastest gut check that it could clear $1k/mo before you committed?

This is some niche stuff! I was looking forward to reading about it, but the link is a 404 at the moment.

Strong signal in this teardown. Niche depth has been my single biggest unlock too — I'm building a tiny iOS memo app aimed at refugees from a specific shutdown service, and the search volume is laughable but conversion from that exact subreddit is wildly higher than anything I tried in broader productivity threads. The cool side effect: feature requests come back in the right vocabulary. People literally name the workflow they want, instead of vague "make it better." It almost writes the roadmap for you. Question — when you spot a niche like Yeasta's, what's your quickest gut check that the audience is large enough to clear a few thousand a month?

A tight niche makes the decision easy. Nobody is comparing Yeasta to twenty generic baking apps. There aren't even three. Broad usually means competitive.

To Anson's question: I think both, but the niche is what lets you go deep. Broad audiences punish depth (too many use cases, too much config). Narrow audiences reward it. Yeasta probably wins because the feature set looks like it was built by someone who actually bakes, and it solves one specific problem.

This is such a great reminder that the problem clarity matters more than the size of the market.
A sourdough tracker sounds niche at first, but the pain point is very specific and real—which is probably why people are willing to pay. It’s not about “another app,” it’s about solving a very focused frustration better than anything else.
I’m currently building a Job Tracker SaaS, and this makes me rethink positioning a bit. Instead of targeting all job seekers, maybe narrowing down to a specific group (like international students, career switchers, or tech applicants) could make the product much more compelling.
Curious—do you think the success here comes more from the niche audience itself, or from how deeply the product solves that one problem?