I spent 9 months building an app that failed. A simple app I built in 3 days kept ~300 MAU for years.

I built TalonInsight after realizing something from my own experience building apps.

A few years ago, I made a simple campus meal menu app in about three days. It was pretty rough, but it solved a very specific problem. Surprisingly, it kept around 250–300 monthly active users for nearly three years.

Last year, I spent nine months building a much more ambitious app. I packed it with features I personally thought were great.

It failed.

Looking back, the difference was obvious. The first app solved something users actually wanted, even if the product itself was simple. The second one was mostly a collection of features I thought were cool, but it didn't really solve a clear problem.

That experience made me realize how important it is to understand real user pain points before building anything.

But doing proper market research usually meant manually reading hundreds or thousands of App Store reviews, which is slow and still makes it hard to see the bigger picture.

So I built TalonInsight.

You type in an app name and it analyzes App Store and Google Play reviews to surface things like:

• what the app’s core value proposition actually is

• unresolved pain points users keep complaining about

• opportunities for building a competing product

You can also analyze 2–5 competing apps at once to get a quick market overview.

The analysis takes about 30 seconds and currently supports 9 markets (US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, India, Brazil, and South Korea).

Current status:

• launched yesterday

• ~100 visitors so far

• collecting feedback and improving the analysis quality

If you're building apps or researching markets, I’d really appreciate honest feedback — especially whether the insights are actually useful.