FAQ

Six sources: Apple App Store reviews, Hacker News, GitHub issues and comments, Stack Exchange, Product Hunt, and CFPB consumer complaint filings. Every Signal links back to the original public post, so you can always click through and read it in context.

Compliance, chosen deliberately. We only collect through official APIs and endpoints that platforms publish for that purpose. Reddit requires a commercial API agreement we do not yet have. Google Play prohibits automated collection outright and offers no official way to read reviews of apps you do not own, so it may stay excluded permanently.

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.

The pipeline collects and processes new Signals daily, and the catalog re-clusters regularly as evidence accumulates. Every quote carries its original post date, and each Dossier shows the date range of its evidence, so you can always judge freshness yourself rather than taking our word for it.

No. A weak match means the public record holds no demand signal for your idea. Some genuinely good ideas live in pains people only discuss privately, in sales calls or Slack channels we cannot and should not see. But if your idea targets a pain you expected to be loud and public, and the match is weak, believe the silence over your hunch.

No, and that is deliberate. GapTheory is not an idea generator. It shows you evidence, including the evidence against you, and you make the call. Anything that generated ideas for you would be guessing with confidence, which is the exact failure mode this product exists to replace.

Because confidence should be earned, not asserted. Instead of printing a number, every Dossier includes Counter-Evidence: the Signals that contradict your Theory. If you read those and your conviction survives, that is your confidence score, and it is worth more than anything we could print.

Yes. Every Gap page has copy-as-Markdown and print actions, which package the evidence, quotes, and attribution for a spec, a pitch deck, or an investor memo.

Email hello@gaptheory.io. And if the answer should have been on this page, tell us that too. See also the Glossary for any unfamiliar term.