app-niche-finderlisted

## When to Use This Skill Call this when: 1. **Finding a problem to solve:** Merchant identifies pain in own store, needs to verify market viability 2. **Validating category fit:** Founder has app idea, wants to assess competition density 3. **Generating ideas from scratch:** Founder has skills but no clear problem direction 4. **Competitive analysis:** App exists, needs to understand gap analysis before building **Do NOT use this if:** - You're building in oversaturated categories (email, basic pop-ups, product reviews) - The idea requires deep ML infrastructure one founder can't handle - Shopify is likely to ship natively (Shopify's roadmap moves fast) --- ## The 3-Step Gap-Finding Framework **Step 1: Low-App-Count Category** Search Shopify App Store for the problem category. Count competitors doing similar thing well. - **Tier 1 opportunity:** 0-3 real competitors (established, but not saturated) - **Tier 2 opportunity:** 4-6 competitors (some fragmentation, room for differentiation) - **Red flag:** 8+ competitors all with 4.5+ rating (category is won) **Step 2: High-Merchant-Pain Signal** Find evidence merchants actively complain about this problem. - **App Store reviews:** Low-star reviews on competitor apps (what's missing?) - **Reddit r/shopify:** Search for problem keyword, count complaint posts - **Shopify Community:** Same search—frequency of "how do I fix this?" posts - **Twitter merchant complaints:** Search "Shopify [problem]" + filter recent - **Built for