Business niche finding tool - would you pay?
As indie hackers many of us are searching for SAAS markets that we can compete in. Ideally, competition exists, but the conditions are right for a new product -- the demand is there but under-served in some way. This can be hard to detect unless you're immersed in that industry.
My idea is an app that gathers public data across SAAS industries, and presents analysis that you can drill down into. For example, you might find an industry where there is demand, but the incumbents are receiving an out-sized amount of negative feedback.
Further drilldowns might reveal more specifics about what customers of those incumbents are unhappy with.
Does this sound like an idea that would be useful, or something that you might even pay for?
Thanks!
Like how you think @ZachT - if you want to get into a point where people will pay for it. You need to craft the hypotheses further and identify the actual point pains around this.
I'm using many existing data aggregate and social listening tools to achieve this goal, such as SimilarWeb, Product Hunt, Mention.com etc - I won't get the answer in one click, but with a little effort, it's doable.
Do you have a plan to solve the problem faster and simpler? Would be great to see the MVP.
I would generally work as follows
Go site like getapp.com , capterra.com etc
Scan all categories and select few of them in which I have capacity to work on based
Scan all the incumbent in each category to get the idea of the market player
Pick few keywords from the description given by the incumbent and do a google search.
In search results I look for ads . Greater number of ads means more is the competition
Again in search results I look for the type of the page I get like Blogs , Product description page etc.
If I see a blog or article , then I look at who is writing that blog. Is it a media company or Some SaaS company
Now after all these, I would have drilled down to once category / problem statement. This will be my problem to solve
Now I go back to getapp.com , capterra.com and read only negative reviews or 1 Star , 2 Star reviews for all the incumbent for a selected category
After this is done, I would have got what is being under served and how is it being under served.
Now I go to linked and send few connect request to the experts in the selected category
Next I will get in touch with those experts and speak about only the topic that I believe has been underserved. This helps me to prove my hypothesis.
13 ) Next , I will repeat the step 11 and 12 for next 3-4 months. Output of this activity builds for confidence for me to go ahead.
Guess, I have come too far writing. I will just finish here.
That's a great list, I think the steps make a lot of sense, thanks.
This sounds cool, how would it work in practice though? How can you quantify out-sized negative feedback?
One thing that might work (though I don't know how to automate this) is making a list of old desktop products that don't have web equivalent (or have poor ones). I am sure there are a bunch of desktop products in weird niches from the 90s that never got updated, never moved to the web...
That's a cool suggestion, thanks. As far as judging negative feedback, I think products can be weighed against both the industry they are in, as well as a global average that can help to indicate sectors that have poorly performing products. I'm sure it's not straightforward to do this, but it's an interesting problem.
Useful: Absolutely. Possible: I'm not so sure.
Most of that information isn't publicly available.
There are cases where it is though, e.g. large plugin ecosystems such as WordPress, Jira or Shopify. Focusing on those and finding areas where there's a huge amount of negative feedback might indeed work.
I hadn't thought about that! That's an interesting idea, thanks.