Long time geek and builder here. I've been working professionally in tech (entertainment, SoMe, games) for almost 25 years but I've always had side projects going for fun.

Like many, I was always focused on the ‘original’ idea - something (I thought) no one had ever done before. The hunt for that whitespace was my drive.

As I aged (and matured?) I came to realize the universal truth that I think most of us get to eventually - albeit some faster than others - there are no truly unique ideas in the world. ;) Everything is a Bundling, Unbundling, Single Step or Domain Change (etc) of everything else.

This was hammered home when I started working on an app for a friend that seemed SO niche, SO specific that I couldn’t imagine anyone else _bothering_ to be in the space. By the time the app was done, there were 3 competitors. ;)

And so I started to build a tool for myself - I started by getting a large corpus of apps from the appstore and whatever complimentary data about them I could find. I stuck it all in a database and just started running queries: “how close are these apps to each other?”, “In this domain is there any meaningful white space left?”, “what app ideas are totally red ocean and not worth competing it?”, etc

The initial thinking here was that using some ai-adjacent algorithms on clusters of data (PCA, cosine-simularity, etc) would allow myself and other indie devs to figure out what we should build next before we start. A tool to intelligently drive the ‘bundle or unbundle or single step’ decision.

And it works - turns out it’s not too hard to take a cluster of apps and find the feature set that would be unique if you built it.

But that then led to another problem - should you build it? Does anyone actually want _another_ micro-saas time tracker app (only this one is tuned to people who manage their own micro-bakery selling a specific sort of premium dog biscuits)?

I took it to my builder friends and most had a similar response: “I don’t want to build yet another app - I want to try and fix the ones I’ve already got. Don’t tell me what to make, tell me how to get users”.

So I hammered on that for a while - ASO, intelligent framing of reddit and YouTube queries, brave API for extra context from the open web, etc. Turns out if you search deep enough, and are carful about how you connect your disparate points in your data lake, you can make some interesting insights about a market and a specific app’s role within it.

And so now I’m at a crossroad - I’m an indie dev with a job and a family and limited time and resources so I need to focus on a single path forwards:

Does the world need yet another tool to help with market research? Another ‘help me find users’ tool?

Or do builders really _want_ to make something unique and differentiable, they just lack the tools that can quantifiably help them do that?

Looking for nudges here. ;)