For the past year, I’ve been chasing ideas for consumer apps. Not SaaS. Not B2B dashboards. Just simple, useful apps people would love. And it’s been brutal.
Every idea I thought of was either obvious, already on the App Store’s front page, or one of those “someone should make this” ideas that no one actually needs. I hit the same dead ends every indie hacker hits: Product Hunt trends, Twitter threads, “Top 50 app ideas” blog posts from 2019.
I was about to give up.
Then one night — dead tired at 1:42AM — I was reading 1-star reviews for this sobriety tracking app I use. People were furious. Complaints about shady subscriptions, bad reminders, no offline mode. But the pattern wasn’t obvious until I read like 40 of them back to back.
And I realized: this is where the real problems live.
So I built AppGaps. An AI tool that scrapes thousands of App Store reviews, clusters them by complaint type, and turns them into clean market gap reports.
The first one I ran surfaced a bunch of ideas instantly:
A sobriety app with transparent pricing and no pushy upsells
A calorie tracker that works properly on smartwatches
An offline meditation app for travelers stuck on flights
I felt like I unlocked a secret level.
Now every time I plug in a popular app, it hands me actual problems people already care about, with their frustrations spelled out in their own words.
This probably won’t be a unicorn, but it might be the most useful indie tool I’ve made. Curious if anyone else has mined reviews for ideas like this — feels like an untapped goldmine.
For the past year, I’ve been chasing ideas for consumer apps. Not SaaS. Not B2B dashboards. Just simple, useful apps people would love. And it’s been brutal.
Every idea I thought of was either obvious, already on the App Store’s front page, or one of those “someone should make this” ideas that no one actually needs. I hit the same dead ends every indie hacker hits: Product Hunt trends, Twitter threads, “Top 50 app ideas” blog posts from 2019.
I was about to give up.
Then one night — dead tired at 1:42AM — I was reading 1-star reviews for this sobriety tracking app I use. People were furious. Complaints about shady subscriptions, bad reminders, no offline mode. But the pattern wasn’t obvious until I read like 40 of them back to back.
And I realized: this is where the real problems live.
So I built AppGaps. An AI tool that scrapes thousands of App Store reviews, clusters them by complaint type, and turns them into clean market gap reports.
The first one I ran surfaced a bunch of ideas instantly:
A sobriety app with transparent pricing and no pushy upsells
A calorie tracker that works properly on smartwatches
An offline meditation app for travelers stuck on flights
I felt like I unlocked a secret level.
Now every time I plug in a popular app, it hands me actual problems people already care about, with their frustrations spelled out in their own words.
This probably won’t be a unicorn, but it might be the most useful indie tool I’ve made. Curious if anyone else has mined reviews for ideas like this — feels like an untapped goldmine.
This is a great idea and implementation! Kudos and keep up the great work!!