Gap analysis is working out whether there is enough room in the market around the problem you want to solve. You look at what already exists, and you find out what none of it does.

The question is not whether competitors exist. They almost always do. The question is why people still have this problem while those competitors are sitting right there.

The question to ask when there seems to be no gap

If there is not a big gap in the market, why are users still having these problems?

If solutions already exist, that is really valuable information. Is it because the current solutions are not good? Is it because they are too expensive? That is actually a gap.

A lot of the time we think there is no gap, look at all these tools addressing it. Then we look properly and discover that yes, there are twenty apps solving this problem, but there is a gap because none of them do a particular thing.

Filling in that blank is the work.

A gap is not always obvious

You will not find it by reading feature lists on landing pages. You find it by using the products the way your users would and noticing where they get annoying.

One thing I do: if the product has a cart, or some kind of long process like a form being filled out, abandon it halfway and see what happens. What a product does when you leave tells you a lot about how much thought went into the parts that are not the demo.

Read the reviews, especially the three star ones. Read what people say in forums when they are not being asked.

And look at the things that are true of all of them at once, not just the features. Say every single budgeting app you find looks serious. That is a little weird, and you can talk yourself out of noticing it, because budgeting is a serious topic, of course it looks serious. But an app about money that is fun, that makes jokes, that has a personality, is a gap nobody was asking for out loud and it can feel much better to use. Not everybody is serious.

If they all share a flaw, that is your opening

When you look across everything on the market and they all have the same flaw, fixing it can become your unique value.

That is the best kind of finding, because it is evidence-based. You are not guessing what would be special about your product, you are pointing at a thing every existing option gets wrong.

Be suspicious of an empty gap

If nobody offers a feature, consider that there might be a reason none of them are offering it.

Sometimes the gap is there because the thing is hard, or expensive to run, or nobody wants it. Before you decide the empty space is an opportunity, work out which one it is.

The check is to go find those users online and read what they are saying about products, just so you know this is a space you want to be in. Sometimes there is a gap because there is no market there. You want to make sure people are actually talking about it.

When there really is no gap

When there is not a solution gap, you need to make sure your product is really solving a very specific problem. Otherwise people will not turn to it.

That is not automatically fatal. A crowded market with a sharply defined problem and a specific group of people can still work. What does not work is entering a crowded market with a general version of what is already there.

There are also gaps that are not about features at all. On the App Store, a keyword where every listing looks bad is a gap where really good screenshots could capture the market, even if other products are better.

What you walk away with

A written answer to three things: what exists, what all of it fails to do, and whether the people who have this problem are visibly out there talking about it.

Those three answers are what make the difference between a hunch about your market and a position you can defend to a developer, an investor, or yourself in six months.

Keep reading

How Do I Know If My App Idea Already Exists?

How to Write a Unique Value Proposition for Your App

App Idea Everyone Thinks Is Unique: Why That's Not the Problem

Learn this with me

Market gap analysis is class 5 of From Passion to Product, my free six-week live course, at the end of the competitive research. I teach it as six kinds of gap: product, audience, pricing, experience, platform and communication, plus the local and geographic ones people forget. The gaps you find there are what class 6 builds a solution into.

Six weeks, live, free, and the analysis is of your own market.

Join the waitlist for the next free cohort, or get the App Strategy Workbook and run the analysis now.