Glossary

A single piece of real evidence from a real person: one App Store review, one Hacker News comment, one GitHub issue. Signals are the raw material. One Signal is an anecdote. Hundreds pointing the same way is something else.

“Every volunteer scheduling app is overly complicated.”

A recurring unmet need found across many Signals. A Gap is not a complaint, it is a market opportunity: something people keep needing that nothing serves well.

Church Volunteer Scheduling. Contractor Project Communication. Property Inspection Reporting.

An established product whose execution falls short, ranked by the friction it generates: reliability problems, bugs, slowness. A Gap says nobody has built this. An Execution Gap says someone built it and it does not work.

The broader market a Gap sits in. Church Operations, Construction Management, Creator Tools. Useful for browsing sideways when a Gap is close to what you want but not quite it.

Your idea, stated as a sentence. Also what we call our own explanation of why a Gap exists. Yours is the thing you validate: typing an idea into the box puts your Theory up against the evidence to see whether it survives.

A specific capability people keep asking for that current tools do not provide. Recurring scheduling. SMS notifications. These are the concrete things inside a Gap, and usually where a first version starts.

The evidence package assembled when you validate a Theory: the match summary, The Read, real quotes, economic evidence, and counter-evidence. Dossiers are saved to your account and kept.

How specific and buildable a Gap is, 0 to 100, judged against a fixed rubric. It rewards buildability over volume, so the loudest Gap is not automatically the highest scoring one. The rubric is strict by design: a typical Gap should not score well.

How strongly people are signalling frustration and unmet need inside a Gap, 0 to 100. High Friction means real pain, not mild preference.

How fast a Gap is gaining Signals, measured over the last 30 days. Momentum does not feed the Opportunity Score, so a high-scoring Gap can be flat rather than growing. Flat often means stable, persistent pain, which is a better foundation than a spike.

How many distinct products a Gap's Signals come from. Pain confirmed across many independent products is stronger evidence that it is real. Single-product evidence may be one company's problem rather than a market's, and the product flags it.

When you validate a Theory, Top Similarity is how closely your idea matches the single closest Gap, as a percentage. Match Strength is the band it falls into: Strong at 50% and above, Partial from 35% to 50%, Weak below 35%. It measures whether we found evidence about your idea, not whether your idea is good.

The plain-language synthesis at the top of a Dossier: what the evidence shows, what it cannot tell you, and how to de-risk the idea this week. No scores. It is written to be the take a seasoned founder would give you over coffee.

Signals where people describe what the problem costs them, or say outright they would pay to fix it. Complaints are cheap. Someone naming a number is not.

Signals that contradict your Theory: people saying the problem is already solved for them, or that they have a workaround they are happy with. This section exists on purpose. We do not print a confidence score, because confidence should be earned rather than asserted.

Where Signals come from: Apple App Store reviews, Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Exchange, Product Hunt, and CFPB consumer complaint filings. Official APIs and public-by-design endpoints only. See the FAQ for why some obvious sources are absent.

Gaps you choose to follow. If you are watching at least one, we email you once a week when the evidence underneath it moves. You can turn this off in Settings.