Finding SaaS and AI tool niches

The marketplace-reverse-engineering method (see Finding niches, Method 1) extends to SaaS, AI tools, and apps too — it just needs a different set of marketplaces, since Flippa and Empire Flippers skew toward content sites.¹

Acquire.com

The SaaS equivalent of Flippa — a marketplace for buying and selling startups and SaaS products.

1. Browse listings and screenshot ones that look promising.
2. Give the screenshot to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to identify the product — its name or URL — or, if it can't, to describe a business that would replicate the same idea.
3. Once you have a URL (found or replicated), reverse-engineer it: check where its traffic actually comes from.

Product Hunt

Browse for launched product ideas. As with Acquire.com, giving Product Hunt's URL (or a specific listing) to an AI assistant and asking it to find replicable products works as a shortcut to manual browsing.

AppSumo

Browse lifetime-deal products. The useful signal here is in the reviews: a product with a mix of 3–4 star reviews usually means real users exist but have an unresolved complaint. That gap — the specific issue reviewers keep raising — is the opportunity: build a version that fixes it, and it can be sold on the same platform.

Chrome Web Store

Browsing extensions surfaces a similar range of small, focused product ideas worth validating the same way.

Shopify app ideas

The Shopify app ecosystem is another source of product niches — ask an AI assistant to help identify demand and gaps for a Shopify app idea before building one.

Footnotes

1. iSkills SEO course notes, compiled 2025. ↩