How I finally stopped wasting months building apps nobody wanted
After shipping two apps that went basically nowhere, I realized my problem wasn't the code or the design. It was that I was picking niches based on gut feel and what seemed "cool." Classic mistake.
Here's what actually changed things for me: treating niche selection like a research problem, not a creativity problem.
The thing most indie devs get wrong
"Fitness app" isn't a niche. It's a category dominated by companies with funding you'll never match. "Kettlebell training tracker for beginners" is a niche. That distinction sounds obvious but it took me an embarrassingly long time to internalize it.
The narrower your focus, the less competition you're fighting, and the easier it is to rank and actually get found.
Two signals worth obsessing over
When you're evaluating a niche, the two things that matter most are:
Top apps with under 1,000 ratings despite ranking well (means the space isn't locked up yet)
Negative reviews on existing apps with the same complaint repeated over and over (means users want something better and nobody's built it)
That second one is huge. Go read the 1 and 2-star reviews on the top apps in any category you're considering. That's basically a free product roadmap.
Where I've landed on tooling
Manual research has real limits. You can only look at so many apps in a day, and by the time a niche shows up in a blog post it's often already crowded.
I've been using Niches Hunter for the discovery and validation side of things. It tracks 40,000+ apps daily and flags niches with revenue potential before they get saturated. The part I find most useful is the Revenue Estimator, which gives you realistic MRR projections based on actual App Store data rather than made-up numbers. Saves me from getting attached to ideas that will never pay anything meaningful.
There's also a Niche Roulette feature that randomly surfaces validated ideas when you're stuck, which sounds gimmicky but has genuinely shown me angles I wouldn't have considered.
I put together a fuller breakdown of the whole process I use now, from initial research through competition analysis to picking a monetization model: https://nicheshunter.app
The one thing I'd tell past me
Run revenue estimation before you write a single line of code. Not after. The monetization model needs to shape the product design from day one, not get bolted on at launch when you realize nobody's paying.
