Hi there,

Welcome back. Today's issue is short, practical and a little unfair to people still doing app research the hard way.

Most people who want to build an app start from a blank page. They brainstorm, they ask friends, they scroll Reddit and they convince themselves they have a great idea. Then they spend months building it. Then nobody downloads it.

That cycle is older than the App Store itself. And it keeps repeating because builders keep solving the wrong problem. The real problem is not "I can't build." It is "I don't know if anyone will pay for this."

There is now a very clean fix for that.

The logic is simple once you see it. If an app is making $50,000 a month, demand is not the problem. People are actively searching for this type of app, downloading it, and paying for a subscription. That is half the battle won before you write a single line of code.

Now add poor ratings into that picture. Two and three star reviews from paying users are not just complaints. They are a product roadmap written by your future customers. Every one-star review that says "crashes constantly," "missing basic features," or "the UI is a nightmare" is telling you exactly what to build differently.

You are not inventing a market. You are walking into one where frustration already exists.

AppKittie is an App Store intelligence platform built specifically for founders and indie developers. Beyond revenue filters, it gives you download data, keyword intelligence, ASO suggestions, competitor ad creatives, and even influencer campaign tracking.​

The revenue and download data helps you size the opportunity before committing. The keyword tools show you what users are actually searching for when they look for this type of app, which is useful both for building and for positioning your product later. Several developers behind apps generating millions in annual revenue already use it as part of their research stack.​

The filter combination of high revenue and low ratings is available right inside the platform's discovery engine.

Once you find an app with verified revenue and poor reviews, the path forward is straightforward. You are not trying to copy it feature for feature. You are building the version people are asking for in the reviews.

Start with one core feature. Make it fast, clean, and reliable. Reviews on competing apps will already tell you what "good" looks like to users in that niche. This is the exact kind of insight that normally takes founders months of user interviews to collect, and here it is sitting in a public ratings section, unread by most competitors.

This also works across regions. AppKittie shows data from multiple countries, which means you can spot an app performing well in one market and build a better version before it expands.​

This method does not guarantee success. Execution still matters. UX, onboarding, and how well you communicate your app's value on the store page all affect whether someone downloads and keeps your app.​

But it removes the single biggest risk most indie developers face: spending months building something with no validated demand. When revenue data confirms people are already paying in this category, you are at least competing on execution, not on luck.​

That is a far better position to be in.

The App Store does not reward the most creative idea. It rewards the most useful execution in a market where demand already exists. The developers who figure that out early stop wasting time validating concepts from scratch and start competing where the evidence is already clear.

AppKittie essentially makes that research process accessible to anyone. The data is there. The complaints are there. The opportunity is there.​

What you do with it is the only variable left.

Until next time, keep building things people actually want.

Found this useful? Share it with someone building their first app. And if you have a newsletter or project you're working on, I'd love to hear about it.

Stay sharp,
Better Every Day