Find what already exists
Your app is not entering a blank space. Even if your exact idea does not exist yet, your customer is already solving the problem somehow: with a competitor, a spreadsheet, a manual workflow, an internal tool, or AI.
Mapping the market helps you understand what customers already know, trust, complain about, pay for, and work around.
By the end, you should have:
- direct competitors
- indirect alternatives
- current workarounds
- common complaints
- what customers already value
- a clear market gap worth exploring
1. Start with the obvious and indirect competitors
Start with the tools your customer would probably compare you to: products solving a similar problem for a similar customer in a similar way.
But don't stop there. Your real competitor might not be another app. It might be a spreadsheet, a Notion doc, an Airtable base, a Zapier flow, a freelancer, an agency, an internal tool, a weekly meeting everyone hates but keeps attending, or ChatGPT/Claude.
For example, if you're building a Shopify app, your competitor might be:
- another Shopify app
- software or a tool that is not built specifically for Shopify
- Shopify itself
- a Shopify theme with the functionality built in
- a spreadsheet or manual workflow the merchant already uses
You're not trying to prove the idea is original. Competition usually means people already care enough to look for a solution.
The point is to understand what customers already use, what they still complain about, and where your app might have room to matter.
2. Read the 2 and 3-star reviews
If your competitors have reviews, the most useful ones are usually not the 1-star rants or the 5-star praise. Look for the 2 and 3-star reviews.
These are often written by people who wanted the product to work, understood the value, and still felt disappointed enough to explain why.
Look for patterns like:
- "Great idea, but…"
- "Works well except…"
- "Too hard to set up"
- "Missing one key feature"
- "Support took too long"
- "Doesn't work for my use case"
- "Too expensive for what it does"
- "I wanted to love this, but…"
One bad review is noise. Five people saying the same thing in different words is a signal there's a gap.
3. Study what people praise
Don't only read complaints. Good reviews tell you what customers already value, whether that's speed, support, reliability, simplicity, integrations, reporting, customization, onboarding, or trust.
This helps you avoid building around a gap nobody cares about. A product can be missing 20 things, but that does not mean all 20 are good opportunities.
You're looking for the overlap between:
- what customers already value
- what they are still frustrated by
- what your app could actually do better
4. Separate feature gaps from market gaps
A missing feature is not automatically a market gap. A useful gap connects back to the customer, pain, workflow, and cost you already defined.
| Weak gap | Stronger gap |
|---|---|
| Competitor does not have AI summaries. | Support leads need a faster way to spot repeat customer issues without reading every ticket manually. |
| Competitor has bad design. | Non-technical users avoid the tool because setup feels too complex and they cannot get to value without help. |
| Competitor is expensive. | Early-stage teams want the workflow, but cannot justify enterprise pricing before they have revenue. |
The stronger gap explains why it matters. That is what you are looking for.
5. Decide what this means for your app
Market research is only useful if it changes your decisions.
After you map the market, you should have a better sense of:
- what customers already expect
- what not to copy
- what your app needs to do differently
- what your first version should ignore
- where your positioning might be sharper
- whether the market is validated, crowded, or weak
The goal is not to build a better version of everything. It's to find a specific opening your customer actually cares about.
Prompt
This prompt is not here to invent fake competitors. It's here to organize what you found and poke holes in the opportunity.
Market map
Take all of my market research notes and organize them into a clear market map.
Please structure it into:
1. Direct competitors
2. Indirect alternatives
3. Manual workarounds
4. AI-based alternatives
5. What customers already pay for
6. Common complaints
7. Common praise
8. Repeated gaps or frustrations
9. What customers seem to value most
10. Possible opening for my app
Then audit the opportunity.
Please flag:
- where the market is already crowded
- where the gap seems weak or feature-level
- where customers may already have a good enough solution
- where I need more evidence
- where my app could be meaningfully different
- where I may be copying competitors instead of solving the customer's problem
- what questions I should ask real users next
Be direct. If the gap does not seem strong enough yet, tell me.
Before you move on
| Check | What to look for |
|---|---|
| You only looked at direct competitors | Your customer may be using spreadsheets, agencies, internal tools, meetings, or AI instead. |
| You treated competition as a bad sign | Existing tools usually mean there is demand. The question is whether there is still a meaningful gap. |
| You confused a missing feature with a market gap | A missing feature only matters if customers actually care about it. |
| You ignored 2 and 3-star reviews | The useful patterns often show up in the "I wanted this to work, but…" reviews. |
| You ignored what people already value | Praise tells you what customers expect and what you probably should not break. |
| You copied the category | The goal is not to become another version of every existing tool. Find the opening your customer actually cares about. |