61 vetted ideas with market research & scoring
Underserved markets with room to grow. Each idea is scouted, analyzed, and scored across 6 dimensions so you can find your next profitable build.
A SaaS founder in Austin watches her Stripe dashboard in horror: 47 subscriptions failed this month due to expired cards, insufficient funds, and bank declines. Stripe's automatic retry recovered 18. The other 29 customers — representing $2,900/mo in MRR — silently churned. They wanted to stay, their credit cards just didn't cooperate. That's $34,800 in annual recurring revenue lost to payment failures alone.
In December 2023, Intuit announced it was shutting down Mint — the free budgeting app used by 3.6 million Americans. The mass exodus created a gold rush for alternatives: YNAB, Monarch, and Copilot reported 300-500% increases in signups. But these alternatives cost $10-15/month, and for users accustomed to free, that's a hard sell. Reddit threads are filled with frustrated ex-Mint users desperately searching for a free alternative that isn't just Credit Karma trying to sell them financial products.
A solo real estate agent posted on r/realtors: 'They are ridiculously expensive and do not do what I want. I ended up getting HubSpot; it is free and I am loving it. I do not like any of the real estate CRMs because they only focus on lead generation.' Another replied: 'Follow Up Boss was bought by Zillow, and who wants to give Zillow MORE access to your data? I hated every minute of the free kvCore we got at a previous brokerage.'
A landlord with three rental properties in suburban Ohio wakes up to a text from a tenant: the water heater broke overnight. She opens a spreadsheet to log the maintenance request, switches to Venmo to check if last month's rent came in, then drafts an email to her usual plumber. This juggling act — spreadsheets for tracking, Venmo for payments, text messages for maintenance — is how most small landlords with 1-10 units operate.
A tech blogger publishes product reviews across 50+ articles. Each article contains 3-5 affiliate links to Amazon, Best Buy, and various SaaS products. When Amazon changes their commission structure (again), she needs to check if those products are still worth promoting. When an affiliate program closes, she has no idea which articles are now pointing to dead links. Her 'system' is a Google Sheet with 200 rows that hasn't been updated in 6 months.
A property manager in Denver reviews rental applications with pay stubs and bank statements. The applicant claims $6,000/month income. The pay stubs look fine — but they're PDF files that took 10 minutes to create in Canva. When she tries to verify employment by calling the listed employer, no one answers. Two months later, the tenant stops paying rent. The eviction process costs $3,500 and takes 4 months.
A plumber in Phoenix quotes a water heater replacement over text message: 'Around $1,500, can do it Thursday.' The homeowner says yes. Thursday comes, the job takes longer than expected, and the bill is $1,800. The customer disputes it — there's no written quote, no clear scope, just a text message. The plumber either eats $300 or fights with an unhappy customer who writes a 1-star review.
A real estate agent in Dallas lists 3-4 properties per month. For each listing, she spends 30-45 minutes writing the MLS description: highlighting features, crafting compelling copy, making sure she mentions the granite countertops, the updated HVAC, and the walk-in closets. After 6 years, she's written over 200 of these descriptions and they're starting to all sound the same.
A B2B SaaS founder records a 45-minute podcast interview. The content is gold — insights about product-market fit, pricing strategies, customer acquisition. But after publishing on Spotify, it dies. Why? Because the audience isn't on Spotify. They're scrolling LinkedIn, skimming newsletters, watching TikTok. That interview could have been 15 LinkedIn posts, 8 Twitter threads, 5 YouTube Shorts, and a newsletter issue. Instead, it's a single podcast episode with 200 downloads.
A solo immigration attorney in Miami drafts 15-20 green card applications per month. Each application requires the same research: checking current USCIS processing times, finding relevant case law for edge situations, drafting supporting letters. She spends 3-4 hours per application on tasks that could be partially automated, limiting her to 20 clients when she could handle 40.
A small business owner in Austin opens QuickBooks Online to reconcile her accounts. There are 347 unreconciled transactions from last month. She starts categorizing: is this Amazon charge office supplies or inventory? Is this Uber ride a business meal or a commute? Two hours later, she's 120 transactions in and has given up. The books stay messy until her accountant asks for them at year-end.
A short-term rental host in Nashville manages 4 properties. It's Saturday at 10 AM — checkout time. She needs cleaners at all four units, each needing linens, towels, and restocking before 4 PM check-in. Her system: a shared Google Calendar her cleaners sometimes check, and a group text where she manually assigns each turnover. One cleaner no-shows. She doesn't find out until the guest texts angry photos of dirty sheets.
A landscaping company owner in suburban Texas manages 80 residential clients with recurring lawn care. His scheduling system: a whiteboard with client names, service days, and special instructions. His invoicing: QuickBooks, where he manually enters each completed job at night. His crew communication: a group text. When a client calls to cancel tomorrow's service, he scrambles to find the whiteboard note while on a job site.
A software engineer with ADHD opens Notion to plan her day. Two hours later, she's built an elaborate task management system with linked databases, rollups, and a Kanban board. She hasn't started a single actual task. This is the ADHD productivity paradox: the same hyperfocus that makes them excellent at complex work also derails them into endless organization and optimization.
A Shopify store owner installs Plug in SEO and runs an audit. The report shows 2,347 issues: missing alt tags, duplicate meta descriptions, slow page speed. She fixes what she can, but Shopify's limitations make some fixes impossible — you can't edit the robots.txt, you can't change how collection pages generate canonical URLs, and theme code changes break on every theme update. She's stuck between generic SEO advice and Shopify's specific constraints.
A manufacturing company in Ohio runs their entire operation on Zoho One — CRM, Books, Inventory, Projects. When they need to integrate Zoho with their specialized equipment monitoring system, they hit a wall. The Zoho Marketplace has 2,500+ extensions, but none connect to their niche industrial software. Zapier has a Zoho integration, but it's surface-level — 15 triggers compared to Zoho's 200+ API capabilities. They spend $30,000 on a custom integration that takes 3 months to build.
A sales rep at a B2B software company has Salesforce open in one tab, Gmail in another, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator in a third. A prospect replies to his email. He reads it in Gmail, switches to Salesforce to log the activity and update the deal stage, switches to LinkedIn to check the prospect's recent posts for context, then switches back to Gmail to reply. Repeat this 50 times a day. He spends more time switching between tools than actually selling.
A freelance graphic designer in Seattle sends logo concepts to her client via email: three PNG files attached with 'V1_final_FINAL_revised.png' naming conventions. The client forwards the email to three stakeholders for feedback. One replies to the original email, one replies-all with a different opinion, and one sends feedback in a separate thread. The designer spends an hour piecing together conflicting feedback from scattered emails, unsure which version everyone is even looking at.
A marketing manager in Chicago applies to 50 jobs over two weeks. She gets zero callbacks. Her resume looks great — professionally designed, clean layout, impressive achievements. But 75% of resumes are rejected by Applicant Tracking Systems before a human ever sees them. Her beautiful PDF uses columns that ATS software can't parse, creative headers the robot doesn't understand, and keywords that don't match the job descriptions.
A DTC skincare brand runs influencer campaigns with 30 micro-influencers per month. Their management system: a Google Sheet with influencer handles, a shared Dropbox for contracts, email threads for negotiation, and manual tracking of who posted what and when. When their marketing manager leaves, the replacement spends two weeks untangling which influencers were paid, which posts went live, and what the actual ROI was. The brand paid $15,000 last month to influencers and has no idea which ones drove sales.
A 42-year-old tech executive in San Francisco wears an Apple Watch, a continuous glucose monitor, tracks sleep with an Oura ring, and just got blood work done through his annual physical. He has health data from five different sources — but no unified picture. His Apple Health app shows steps. His Levels app shows glucose spikes. His doctor's portal has lab results. Nowhere does anyone connect the dots: 'Your poor sleep correlates with your elevated HbA1c, and both might explain your afternoon energy crashes.'
A personal injury attorney in Phoenix gets 50 intake calls per week. His intake process: paralegal takes the call, writes notes on a legal pad, emails the notes to the attorney, attorney reviews and calls back (if he remembers), paralegal manually types up the retainer agreement, mails it for signature, waits 3-5 days for return, then calls to schedule a meeting. By the time the retainer is signed, 40% of leads have already hired another attorney. Each lost case represents $5,000-50,000 in potential fees.
A litigation attorney in Boston receives 15,000 pages of discovery documents in a wrongful termination case. Her job: find every mention of the plaintiff, identify all performance reviews, and flag potentially relevant communications. With junior associates billing $250/hour, manual review would cost $75,000 and take 3 weeks. Even with keyword search, context matters — 'Smith performed well' and 'Smith performed poorly' both contain 'Smith performed' but have opposite implications.
A tax preparer in suburban New Jersey has 180 clients. From February to April, her phone rings constantly: 'When can I bring in my documents?' 'Do you have availability Saturday?' 'I need to reschedule.' She spends 2 hours per day just managing her calendar — time she could spend preparing returns at $75-150/hour. That's $15,000+ in lost revenue during the 10-week tax season.
A Shopify merchant selling handmade pottery ships 500 orders per month. Her shipping rules are complex: free shipping over $75, flat $8 rate for small items, calculated rates for heavy pieces, and no shipping to Hawaii for ceramics (breakage risk). She changes a rule to offer free shipping over $50 for a holiday promotion. The next day, a customer in Alaska orders a $51 item. Shipping costs $45. She just lost $37 on that order because she didn't think through the edge case.
A freelance web developer in Portland manages 8 active clients. His client communication system: email for updates, Dropbox for file sharing, Trello for project status (that clients never check), Google Drive for deliverables, and Stripe invoices sent separately. When a client asks 'where are we on the project?' he spends 15 minutes assembling a status update from four different tools. Clients ask the same questions repeatedly because there's no single source of truth.
A software engineer in Seattle finishes work at 11 PM, anxious about tomorrow's deadline. She wants to talk through her stress, but her therapist's next appointment is in 2 weeks. Her friends are asleep. She could journal, but she needs conversation, not monologue. She opens Replika, but the AI keeps flirting instead of helping her process anxiety. She wants an AI that feels like a good therapist — warm, curious, boundaried — available at 11 PM when she needs it.
A custom furniture maker in rural Vermont gets a request for a dining table. He needs to quote: wood species ($400-2,000 depending on choice), dimensions, finish options, delivery ($0-500 based on distance), and installation. His current system: open Excel, manually calculate material costs, add labor hours at $65/hour, format it to look professional, export as PDF, email it. The whole process takes 45 minutes. If he sent 10 quotes per week, that's 30+ hours monthly on quoting alone.
An Etsy seller with 2,000 listings wakes up to a nightmare: her shop is suspended. The reason: trademark violation. Buried in her listings was a vintage-style poster using the word 'Olympics' — a trademark she didn't realize was protected. She spent 3 years building the shop, has 1,500 5-star reviews, and now faces losing her $8,000/month income because of one listing she forgot about.
A consultant on a 14-hour flight to Singapore opens Notion to prepare for her client meeting. 'No internet connection.' Her entire workspace is inaccessible. Her notes, project plans, and client briefs — locked behind a loading spinner at 35,000 feet. She spends the flight watching movies instead of working. This happens every time: airplanes, remote job sites, spotty hotel WiFi. Her productivity tool requires connectivity to be productive.
An MSP in Minneapolis signs a new 50-person client. The onboarding begins: collect admin credentials for all systems, document network topology, inventory all hardware and software, set up monitoring agents, configure backup policies, and train staff on the new ticket portal. The onboarding technician juggles spreadsheets, emails, and sticky notes. Three weeks later, they discover the client has a legacy server nobody mentioned because the credential collection form was incomplete.
New parents in Brooklyn share childcare duties. Dad does the morning bottle, Mom handles the afternoon nap. At 6 PM, when Dad gets home: 'Did she eat lunch?' 'When was her last diaper?' 'Did she nap long enough?' Mom can't remember — she was juggling work calls during the chaos. They've texted each other 47 times today with updates that got lost in scroll. Meanwhile, the pediatrician asks 'How many wet diapers per day?' and they guess.
A product manager in New York applies to 80 jobs over 6 weeks. Her tracking system: a Google Sheet with columns for company, role, date applied, and status. By week 4, she can't remember which companies she actually applied to versus bookmarked. She misses a follow-up because the interview request went to spam and she forgot she'd applied. She accidentally applies to the same company twice through different job boards. The job search is overwhelming not because of the applications, but because of the tracking.
An MSP technician in Dallas gets an urgent ticket at 7 PM: a client's server is down. He's at dinner with his family. He pulls out his phone, opens ConnectWise... and waits. The desktop-designed interface renders on his iPhone screen as a wall of tiny buttons and unreadable text. He pinches and zooms trying to find the client details and ticket history. By the time he extracts the server IP to remote in, 10 minutes have passed. The client is furious.
A 50-person accounting firm loses internet connectivity at 2 PM during tax season. The office manager calls their IT guy (who's part-time). He drives over, checks the router, checks the switches, checks the firewall. An hour later, he finds the problem: a switch in the server closet failed silently 45 minutes ago. The firm lost 2 hours of productivity across 50 people — 100 person-hours — because nobody knew the switch was dying until everything stopped working.
A course creator in Toronto has a bestselling English course on Udemy. She wants to reach the Spanish-speaking market — 500+ million potential customers. Traditional dubbing would cost $5,000-15,000 and take weeks. She could use subtitles, but completion rates for subtitled courses are 40% lower than native language. She's leaving millions on the table because localization is too expensive and slow.
A DeFi developer launches a yield farming protocol after 6 months of work. The TVL (Total Value Locked) grows to $2 million in the first week. On day 9, a hacker exploits a reentrancy vulnerability the developer missed. $1.8 million drained in 12 minutes. The protocol is dead. The developer's reputation is destroyed. A professional audit would have caught the bug — but OpenZeppelin wanted $50,000 and a 6-week timeline. He thought he could audit it himself.
A furniture manufacturer in North Carolina sources wood from Vietnam, hardware from China, and fabric from India. In early 2024, Red Sea shipping disruptions add 3 weeks to delivery times. They don't find out until their production line stops because fabric didn't arrive. The company loses $200,000 in delayed orders while scrambling to find alternative suppliers. Their supply chain 'monitoring' was checking emails from freight forwarders — reactive, not proactive.
A home cook in Denver finds a recipe on AllRecipes. She scrolls past 3 auto-play video ads, 2 newsletter popups, and 1,500 words of 'the history of chocolate chip cookies' to reach the actual recipe. She screenshots it to avoid loading the site again. Her camera roll has 400 recipe screenshots, unsearchable and unorganized. When she wants to make that Thai curry from 3 months ago, she scrolls through hundreds of images hoping to find it.
A senior developer in Seattle develops RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) from 15 years of coding. His doctor tells him: reduce keyboard time or face permanent damage. He tries Dragon NaturallySpeaking — designed for dictation, not code. 'def calculate underscore total open parenthesis items close parenthesis colon' is unbearable. He considers leaving software development. His hands hurt too much to type, but the tools for voice coding feel like using a chainsaw to perform surgery.
A biotech startup in Boston runs a 50-patient clinical trial for a new diabetes treatment. Their clinical data management: Excel spreadsheets, paper case report forms, and a part-time data manager. The FDA auditor arrives and asks for an audit trail of data changes. There is none — corrections were made directly in Excel without tracking who changed what or when. The audit finding delays their regulatory submission by 4 months, costing $2 million in runway.
A college junior in Michigan has finals in 3 weeks: Organic Chemistry, Statistics, American Literature, and Microeconomics. She knows she should study, but where to start? O-Chem is hard but she's doing okay in it. Stats is easier but the final is worth 40% of her grade. She opens a blank Google Doc to make a study plan, stares at it for 20 minutes, gets overwhelmed, and opens TikTok instead. The plan never gets made. She crams the night before each exam.
A farm-to-table restaurant in Portland pays OpenTable $1.25 per seated diner from their platform — that's $2,500/month just in cover fees. Plus a $449/month subscription. Plus they don't own their customer data — OpenTable does. When a loyal customer books through OpenTable, the restaurant can't email them directly about a special tasting menu. OpenTable can market competing restaurants to that same customer. The restaurant is paying to build someone else's customer base.
A marketing executive in Chicago sets a New Year's resolution to exercise 4x per week. By February, she's done exactly 6 workouts total. Her habit tracker (Streaks) shows a depressing row of red X's. She knows she should exercise, but looking at her failure record makes her feel worse, not motivated. She deletes the app. The tracker measured her failure; it didn't help her succeed.
A CPA in suburban Atlanta manages 80 small business clients. Her inbox: 400 unread emails. Some are client questions she needs to answer. Some are bank statements she needs to file. Some are QuickBooks notifications. Some are IRS notices requiring urgent action. She spends the first 90 minutes of every day just triaging email, trying to figure out which fires to put out first. Meanwhile, critical IRS deadlines hide in the noise.
A bride-to-be in Austin has 14 months until her wedding. Her planning system: a Pinterest board with 500 pins, a shared Google Sheet with her fiancé (last updated 2 months ago), a notebook of vendor contacts, and a group chat with bridesmaids that's 90% memes. When her mom asks 'Have you confirmed the caterer for the tasting?' she has no idea — the caterer's email is buried in her inbox somewhere. She spends 3 hours every weekend just trying to figure out what she should be doing.
A call center agent in Phoenix takes a call from a customer who wants to transfer $50,000 to a new account. 'For security, I need your mother's maiden name and the last four of your social.' The customer provides the answers — answers that a fraudster with basic research could also provide. Account takeover fraud costs US financial institutions $11+ billion annually, and knowledge-based authentication (security questions) is the weakest link.
A family drives 45 minutes to a concert at an outdoor amphitheater. They arrive to find the main lot full. They circle for 20 minutes, finally park in an overflow lot a half-mile away, and miss the opening act. Meanwhile, 50 premium spots near the entrance sat empty — reserved for a corporate group that never showed up. The family paid $15 for a terrible parking experience; they would have gladly paid $35 for guaranteed close parking.
A 200-person manufacturing company in Ohio lands a contract with a Fortune 500 customer. During onboarding, the customer's procurement team sends a 47-page supplier sustainability questionnaire. The operations manager stares at questions about Scope 3 emissions, water usage metrics, and diversity spending percentages. They have none of this data. They spend 80 hours scrambling to compile something — mostly guesses formatted to look like data. They pass the audit barely. Next year, they'll have to do it again.
A nonprofit running a weekend food drive needs 40 volunteers across 8 time slots. The volunteer coordinator sends a SignUpGenius link, 60 people sign up, then 15 no-show. She spent 3 hours sending reminder emails that half the volunteers didn't read. During the event, she scrambles to cover gaps while also trying to actually run the food drive. Next month, she'll do it all again — and half her volunteer base has ghosted because they felt unappreciated.
Every day, thousands of gig workers—Uber drivers, DoorDash dashers, Instacart shoppers—wake up to find their accounts deactivated with little explanation. One bad customer review, a GPS glitch, or an algorithmic false positive can end their livelihood overnight. The appeal process is kafkaesque: form letters, chatbots, and weeks of silence.
A product manager in San Francisco has been doing Duolingo Spanish for 847 days straight. She can conjugate verbs in the preterite tense. She knows the word for 'owl.' But when she goes to Mexico City for a conference and tries to order coffee, she freezes. The barista speaks too fast. The words she learned don't match real conversation. 847 days of gamified lessons, and she can't have a basic conversation.
It's 5:30 PM in suburban Denver. A working mom stares into her refrigerator: leftover rice, some vegetables, half a chicken breast, and condiments. She has 30 minutes before soccer practice and no plan. She orders DoorDash for the third time this week — another $45 that wasn't in the budget. She knows meal planning would save money and time, but planning takes time she doesn't have.
A game developer needs 50 props for an indie RPG: chairs, tables, weapons, potions, treasure chests. Professional 3D modeling would cost $50-200 per asset — $2,500-10,000 for props alone. He opens Blender and spends 3 hours making one mediocre chair. At this rate, the props will take longer than the actual game development. He needs 3D assets, not 3D modeling skills.
An indie developer in Berlin is ready to beta test his new iOS app. He posts on Reddit asking for testers — gets 200 sign-ups. He sends TestFlight invites to all of them. 30 actually install the app. 8 provide any feedback, via scattered emails and DMs. He has no idea which users experienced which bugs, who's actually using the app, or how to prioritize the feedback he received. The 'beta test' gave him almost no useful data.
A DTC supplement brand in Miami spends $15,000/month on micro-influencer partnerships. The results are inconsistent: some creators nail the brief, others deliver unusable content. Scheduling is a nightmare. And the brand never owns the content — if the influencer relationship ends, those posts can disappear. Meanwhile, virtual influencer Lil Miquela has 2.7 million Instagram followers and books brand deals with Prada and Calvin Klein. She never gets tired, never has a scandal, and her brand controls every pixel.
A watercolor artist in New Mexico has been painting for 30 years. Her work hangs in galleries across the Southwest. Her online presence: a Facebook page with 200 followers (half are family) and no portfolio website because she can't figure out Squarespace. Meanwhile, a digital artist with 2 years of experience has 50,000 followers on ArtStation and gets commission requests weekly. The platforms were built for digital artists; traditional artists are invisible online.
A regional trucking company in Tennessee wants to offset its fleet emissions to win contracts with ESG-conscious shippers. The CEO searches 'buy carbon credits' and finds... confusion. Voluntary carbon markets are opaque: prices range from $5 to $50 per ton with no clear explanation of quality differences. One registry sells forestry credits from a project later found to be fraudulent. Another requires minimum purchases of 10,000 tons — far more than needed. He gives up and hopes the shippers don't actually check.
A tech-savvy homeowner in Seattle has 47 smart devices: Philips Hue lights, Nest thermostats, August locks, Sonos speakers, Ring cameras. Each has its own app. To set a 'leaving home' scene, he opens four apps and taps through 12 screens. He tried Home Assistant — spent a weekend configuring YAML files before his wife demanded he stop. Now the smart home mostly runs on individual schedules and hope.
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