About GapTheory

Every day, people describe exactly what software fails them: in app reviews, developer forums, support threads, and complaint filings. It is the most honest market research that exists, because nobody writes an angry review to be polite. But it is scattered across millions of posts, so founders make six-month bets on a hunch and a few conversations instead.

GapTheory reads that public record continuously, clusters the recurring unmet needs into named, scored Gaps, and lets you put your own idea up against the evidence before you commit to building it.

Confidence must be earned, not asserted. We do not print a confidence score, because a number that tells you what you want to hear is worthless. Instead, every validation includes the evidence against you: people saying the problem is already solved, or that they are happy with a workaround. If your conviction survives the counter-evidence, it is real.

Evidence over opinions. Every Signal in GapTheory links back to a real post by a real person, with a source and a date. You never have to take our word for anything; click through and read the original.

We are not an idea generator. GapTheory will not tell you what to build. AI can generate a plausible guess; it cannot count real demand, and it cannot remember whether a pain was growing last quarter. We show you what people are actually asking for, why the evidence might be misleading, and you make the call.

We only collect from official APIs and endpoints that platforms publish for that purpose: Apple App Store reviews, Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Exchange, Product Hunt, and CFPB consumer complaint filings.

We do not scrape platforms that prohibit it, even where the data is publicly visible, which is why some obvious sources are missing from that list. We would rather have a smaller corpus we are allowed to have than a bigger one we are not. Evidence you might be forced to delete is not evidence you can build a company on, and that goes for us too.

GapTheory is in private beta. The catalog currently tracks tens of thousands of Signals across more than a thousand Gaps, growing daily. If you want in, join the beta; if you want to see the product first, the docs show exactly how it works.

Questions, skepticism, or a source you think we should add: hello@gaptheory.io. We read everything.