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.