I thought I had 5 competitors. Turns out I had dozens.
When I first started researching personal finance apps, I found maybe 5–6 companies that felt like real competition.
That was reassuring. I thought I understood the market and where Stoke might fit.
But as I dug deeper into startup directories, Product Hunt, old launch lists, and smaller communities, I realized there were dozens of personal finance apps I had never heard of.
At first, that scared me. It made the market feel way more crowded than I expected.
But weirdly, it also gave me more confidence in what I’m building with Stoke.
The more products I found, the more I noticed how many felt like variations of the same thing: budgeting, expense tracking, and net worth dashboards. Seeing that actually made Stoke’s direction feel clearer to me, because I’m trying to build around a more specific user and a more opinionated angle.
The big lesson for me:
Don’t validate an idea by only looking at the winners everyone already knows. Look at the graveyard too.
Survivorship bias can make you think nobody is solving a problem, when in reality a lot of people tried — they just didn’t stand out.
That shifted my thinking from:
“Do I have competition?”
to:
“What does this crowded market reveal about how Stoke needs to be different?”
I’d be curious how others think about this. Has finding more competitors ever made you feel better about your direction?
Building Stoke here: stokemoney.com
The graveyard is also where you find the most honest pricing data.
Live competitors show you their current pricing — which is often the result of years of iteration, funding that let them absorb losses, or enterprise contracts subsidizing a cheap self-serve tier. You can't actually replicate that pricing as a bootstrapper.
The failed apps show you what didn't work economically. A lot of personal finance apps died at the $2-5/mo range — not because users wouldn't pay, but because that price point couldn't cover support costs at scale and couldn't justify continued development. The subscription economics were broken before the product was.
That's actionable: it tells you the floor pricing that's required for survival, which is different from the price that converts best in A/B tests.
On Stoke specifically — the graveyard question worth investigating is whether the apps that failed did so because of product-market fit, or because of habit formation. Personal finance has a unique activation problem: users are most motivated at the moment of crisis (overdraft, debt realization) but that's also when a new tool adds the most friction. The apps that survived usually solved session zero — getting value before the user has added all their accounts.
The only competition one truly has is with their self, bro.
deep bro.
Lol, i had exactly same impression when i started building a video editor. I keep finding new ones catering all sorts of users pretty much weekly.
The graveyard-first research methodology is underrated. Most founders look at who's currently winning — but the companies that tried and failed tell you something more useful: what assumptions failed, which user segments were harder to retain than expected, which pricing models didn't survive.
In personal finance specifically, a lot of the graveyard apps died not because the product was bad, but because of passive churn. Finance apps have high initial setup enthusiasm, then low engagement over time. Users don't cancel — they just forget to open the app. By month 3, payment cards have expired and nobody bothers to update them.
The differentiation question you're asking — 'what does crowded reveal about how Stoke needs to be different?' — is the right one. The answer is usually in what the graveyard apps didn't solve: not the product, but the retention mechanics. The surviving finance apps have either a strong habit loop or they're embedded in a workflow people do anyway.
Good luck with Stoke.
The graveyard lesson is one of the most underused research methods. Why previous attempts failed tells you more about what the market actually needs than studying the winners.
Same exercise with RecoverKit — payment recovery has Churnbuster, Gravy, and even Stripe's built-in dunning. On the surface: crowded. But the graveyard of failed Stripe dunning tools almost universally died from the same problem — too much setup. Zapier flows that break. Email templates you configure manually. Cron jobs that need maintenance. Each one solved the payment failure detection problem and then handed the rest back to the founder.
The 'dozens of competitors' signal validated the unmet segment: SaaS founders under 0k MRR who know they have a payment failure problem but don't have 2 days to build a solution and can't justify enterprise recovery pricing. That gap wasn't obvious from looking at the winners. It was only visible from the graveyard.
The shift from 'do I have competition?' to 'what does the crowded market reveal?' is exactly right.