Author: Kesar

Every business will face problems like low sales, poor engagement, or inconsistent results. For solopreneurs, the stakes are higher because your success hinges on your personal productivity.

But there’s good news: Even if you’ve invested time, energy, or money into an idea, it’s never too late to step back and ask the right questions so your product or service fits your audience’s needs. 

In fact, the most successful businesses are the ones that evolve after revisiting their core assumptions. (Dyson went through 5,126 vacuum iterations until one worked!)

Here are essential questions to identify meaningful problems, generate valuable insights, and create something your audience will love – with the help of GummySearch. 🙂

Understanding Underlying Problems to Match Your Messaging to Your Audience

Solopreneurs often jump straight to building a solution without assessing whether the problem is big enough. Asking the right questions can help you validate that your solution truly fits their needs, such as the following:

• Who exactly is my audience?
• What problem am I solving for that audience, and why does it matter?
• How can I ensure I’m addressing the most significant problem?
• How do customer needs and frustrations evolve over time, and how can my product adapt?

Let’s bring this to life with an example: a small candle business.

Using GummySearch to Find Meaningful Answers

Click the “Audiences” icon on the left side of your dashboard, and then the “Make a new audience” button.

After creating your audience, GummySearch lets you pick relevant subreddits because there’s nothing like hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth. 

For example, searching for “candles” might fetch communities focused on candle-making, scented candles, and enthusiasts. These subreddits act as a broad audience base, with the option to add more communities later.

GummySearch also highlights key subreddit details, such as activity level, size, and engagement metrics, giving you a clear snapshot of your audience’s potential reach.

Here’s what the “Candle Enthusiasts” audience looks like:

You’ll discover key sorting-based themes like Hot Discussions, Top Content, Solution Requests, Money Talk, Pain Points, Advice, Ideas, and News – ranked by how frequently people discuss them. But you’re not limited to these. 

If you want something specific, browse AI-based topics like candle scents, sales trends, deals, or seasonal promotions.

For even faster research, GummySearch’s AI-powered “Ask” feature answers your questions with information and patterns from real Reddit posts, with sources.

To understand your audience, whether your product meets their needs, or if your messaging aligns with their preferences, a single reverse-engineering question like, “Why do people buy candles?” can reveal patterns, motivations, and preferences.

And just like that, GummySearch filtered through 100 relevant submissions based on my question, saving me 34 minutes by speed-reading 8,352 words. 

Here’s the summary it found for me:

The data tells us that… 

• The audience loves unique scents.
• They love creating moods and memories with different scents, even repeatedly buying from the same brands due to an “attachment” to certain scents.

There’s a lot to unpack, but we know that scents come up often.

As a bonus, you’ll naturally start learning about competitors – what people like and dislike, and where opportunities lie. 

Identifying Awareness Problems 

Your solution might be amazing, but if people don’t know it exists or understand its value, success will always feel out of reach.

Many solopreneurs face scattered marketing, unclear messaging, or their audience doesn’t see them as the solution. Questions to address these problems include:

• Are my marketing and branding efforts reaching my ideal audience?
• Is my messaging clear, consistent, and memorable?
• How do my competitors stand out, and what lessons can I apply?

Platforms like the Five Second Test help you quickly measure a user’s first impression of your landing page, site, or campaign design with real users. 

To find competitors, use the Products tab in GummySearch as your go-to spot. 

Here, you’ll see product categories sorted by discussion frequency. The most talked-about categories are at the top, followed by less-mentioned ones. Each category includes reviews, star ratings, and mention counts.

Every GummySearch session can lead to surprising discoveries. 

While researching why people buy candles, I found a comment saying HomeWorks and Yankee Candle are “rock-bottom quality right now.” 

Naturally, I clicked the blue View button.

It took me straight to the Reddit threads with more competitor discussions.

Source

Turns out, you can outperform Yankee Candle, even though you’re not as big. 

Customer Acquisition and Retention

Understanding why customers choose your product (or go elsewhere) or what’s stopping them from returning helps you address issues before they escalate. Focus on questions like:

• How do I encourage repeat customers and create loyalty?
• Am I pricing my products or services appropriately?
• Are there untapped opportunities for additional revenue streams?

To understand your audience, ask them. If you have a customer base, leverage one-on-one interviews and targeted surveys. 

When direct feedback isn’t an option, or you want to cross-reference your findings, use GummySearch! The Solution Requests tab shows what customers are asking for across different communities.

I discovered people love fragrant products (confirming our existing data), mason jars for decor, seasonal scents, limited editions for collections, and aesthetically pleasing items. These insights point to upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

You can easily validate these findings. Try posting a poll on Instagram Stories asking, “What scents or products do you want next?” 

When it comes to pricing, the Money Talk tab in GummySearch is best. 

People discuss value perceptions, budgets, and spending habits. Just like the Solution Requests tab, GummySearch’s AI summarizes and organizes posts by frequency, with the most featured topics at the top.

For deeper insights, click the Common Patterns button. 

This feature highlights recurring themes – whether people think prices are too high, if they’re overspending, or if a product feels like a good deal.

One pattern stood out: someone questioned if $24 for an 8oz candle was reasonable. GummySearch links to the original Reddit post where you can explore the discussion.

When I did that, here’s what the rest of the post said:

“Dropping $100 on candles seems absurd to my penny-pinching sensibilities. Tell me that the margins for these companies aren’t padded. Tell me that it’s art more than science. Tell me whatever will push me over the edge for this kind of spend.”

If your audience is someone on a budget, you’ve hit the jackpot with gems like this one: 

That’s a whole class on candle-making, pricing, and marketing. Plus, this proves some high-intent buyers are willing to stretch their budget if your product exceeds their expectations.

Combining Money Talk insights with a pricing audit helps you move from guesswork to strategy. When auditing competitors, consider your audience and brand positioning. Are you targeting budget-conscious buyers or premium customers seeking artisanal products? 

The goal isn’t to copy pricing but to understand its context and make informed decisions for your own pricing strategy.

Problems Aren’t the Enemy. Guesswork Is.

The goal isn’t to avoid problems but to expect them and have systems to spot and address them as your business grows. Instead of guessing what your customers want, you can listen, observe patterns, and validate your ideas in real time.

Reminder: going back to the drawing board isn’t a failure. Taking a step back allows you to ask smarter questions and fine-tune your approach. 

Those small foundational fixes lead to the biggest breakthroughs!

A market gap is essentially a disconnect between what people need and what’s currently available in the market. These gaps could be due to missing features, poor user experience, or even an entirely untapped niche.

As a real-life example, if Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp hadn’t identified a huge market gap when building Uber, we’d all be frantically waving our hands trying to hail an overpriced taxi to this day.

So how can you track and identify gaps in your market? Read on!

Methods for Identifying Market Gaps

A quick note: there’s no cookie-cutter way to uncover market gaps. However, combining multiple strategies can increase your chances of finding big areas for improvement. Below, I’ll walk you through tried-and-true methods you can mix and match, with examples to inspire you.

Review Mining

Review mining is exactly what it sounds like. It involves parsing through reviews on platforms like Amazon, G2, Yelp, or even App Store ratings to give you precious customer insights that mention market gaps.

That said, there’s a sweet spot for mining those reviews: the ones belonging to 3-star and 4-star ratings. After all, five-star praise – particularly on G2 – is likely to feature comments like “I can’t think of anything to dislike.” On the other hand, 1-star reviews are likely to be “this absolutely sucks,” with no insightful additions whatsoever.

Prioritize the “good enough” and “meh” reviews, where people talk about what they wish the product could do better.

The Problem with Review Mining

Review mining is a double-edged sword. It’s easy to enter a massive rabbit hole and get lost in tabs after tabs of research. Plus, you may stumble upon “encouraged” and fabricated reviews, which could eventually skew your data.

In this case, the place to go is Reddit. There, completely anonymous folks with goofy usernames can be bluntly honest about their likes and dislikes.

However, Reddit has 73.1 million daily active users and around 550 million posts. That’s a massive rabbit hole all over again. In this case, I should introduce GummySearch.

GummySearch helps you organize and analyze Reddit posts, eliminating the need to manually comb through thousands of posts for market gaps.

With GummySearch’s AI-powered features (like asking AI anything or finding patterns in Reddit posts), you can save hours of reading, measured in AI minutes. This keeps your research accurate, quick, and efficient.

Cool. Now, Where Do I Start with Review Mining In GummySearch?

You’ll start by creating a new Audience for your product or solution. Click the “Audiences” icon on the left-hand side of your dashboard, and then the big “Make a new audience” button.

(This process works whether you’re trying to find market gaps for an existing or potential product.)

Next, you’ll select different subreddits that most reflect your audience. Here’s an example:

Let’s say I have an app for fitness enthusiasts who want to determine what competitors lack. In this case, my subreddit choices would be, say, r/GYM, r/fitness, r/AdvancedFitness, and more. That’s where people will be voicing their beliefs, desires, and frustration for fitness.

Note that you can always add or exclude subreddits as you go. 🙂

Here’s what my fresh audience, “Fitness Enthusiasts,” would look like:

This audience might only contain 5 subreddits, but that’s ‌17.6M members. There’s no way I’ll manually sift through all of that!

That’s why I’ll leverage GummySearch’s AI-based themes to help me find the most relevant themes in a fraction of the time, including:

• Advice Requests
• Solution Requests
• Pain & Anger
• Money Talk
• Ideas
• Opportunities
• Self-Promotion
• News

(If there isn’t enough data to extract patterns, not all of them will be available.)

I’d like to find out which solutions people are looking for so that I can potentially incorporate new features inside my fitness app. 

Going back to our example, when I go to Solution Requests, here’s what AI tells me based on what 76 people are saying:

All those requests are worth noting. But let’s say I’d like to be more granular and find requests specifically for fitness apps. All I need to do is directly ask AI by clicking the “Ask ✨” tab, and it’ll fetch any mentions with respective sources for me.

From the above analysis, I can already see a few potential gaps worth filling:

• There’s room for a simpler way to track macros and calories while also sharing recipes or collaborating with a partner.
• Many apps could do better at showing progress with clean, engaging visuals like graphs or infographics for workout completion or tracking over time.
• Real-time sharing features for progress, recipes, or workout plans are lacking, which leaves a gap for collaboration-focused tools.

Sentiment Analysis in Market Gap Research

Companies that connect with their customers’ emotions see major payoffs. Every single purchase or subscription you make has an underlying emotion at play – be it anger, fear, guilt, or hope. That’s why sentiment analysis should be a non-negotiable step in your market gap analysis.

GummySearch has a special corner for one of the most powerful human emotions: anger – and the pain that often precedes it. It’s called…drum roll…Pain & Anger.

This is the section where people will open up about their concerns about existing solutions and the status quo.

In my case, I found several points to explore:

Of all these frustrations, what are some common patterns? All I have to do is click “Common patterns ✨” to summarize 68 submissions and save 51 minutes of reading.

Here’s what the AI identified:

I could identify several potential gaps from the above. These could be features that…

• Highlight micro-progress, such as small improvements in form or reps.
• Offer adaptive exercise plans based on user-specific challenges.
• Offer customized plateau-busting plans.

And more.

Customer Feedback (Both Quantitative and Qualitative) in Market Gap Identification

Quantitative Feedback for Finding Market Gaps

Quantitative feedback focuses on scores and statistics.

For example, surveys are a great way to get meaningful numbers you can analyze. If you already have a product, you could ask users to rate how easy it is to complete a specific task in your product. If the scores consistently hover around a 6/10, that’s a sign you’ve got room to improve.

If you don’t have a product, a great way to look at your competitors’ ratings is to check their star ratings. 

On your GummySearch dashboard, click the Audiences icon, then click the “Products” tab. This is where people will be specifically talking about and reviewing products.

Remember the 3-4 star rule? It applies here as well!

When they say it may not be too different from any other app but it’s what they’ve “gotten used to,” that’s what you’re fighting against: inertia and the status quo. 

The deeper your market gap analysis, the stronger and more competitive your product can be.

Qualitative Feedback

Qualitative feedback focuses on the “why” behind the “what.”

Open-ended questions like, “What’s the most frustrating thing about using this product?” can generate long, insight-fueled answers that go over what led people to choose a solution.

Ideally, you’d ask this type of question during customer interviews, where you can truly connect with customers and ask follow-up questions. But if you’re short on time, GummySearch can be just as helpful.

AI-generated summaries and analyses can help pinpoint the right Reddit posts/comments to dive into. But for authenticity reasons, I’d suggest you read and document relevant submissions word for word. That’s how you can find use cases, “sticky” language, and eye-opening perspectives.

Behavior Analysis

Watching how users interact with your product can reveal pain points they might not articulate directly. Here’s where tools like heatmaps, funnel analysis, and session replays are useful. Apps such as UXCam help you identify friction points in journeys and discover the reasons why users might not be taking action.

For example, if users frequently drop off (or rage-tap their screens) during a specific step in your onboarding process, that’s a red flag. Addressing this gap could improve user retention and satisfaction.

Keep an Eye on Market Trends

Market trends can reveal emerging needs or shifts in consumer behavior that create new gaps to fill. You can use tools like Google Trends to track rising interest in certain search terms.

Or, you can use GummySearch for social listening. This way, you’ll be tracking relevant keywords and never miss a mention!

Let’s say I want to stay in the loop whenever people mention anything related to fitness apps. I’d click on “Advanced Search (the 🔍icon)” on the left-hand side and type in the keyword I want to track for my Fitness Enthusiasts audience.

GummySearch displays results that include exact matches and related keywords. Depending on the types of results I get, I can decide whether a keyword is worth tracking. The mentions I see here are quite recent, so I’ll give this one a shot.

To track it, I’ll just click the 🔔 icon in the upper right corner. And that’s it!

Final tip: Whenever available, don’t forget to check valuable AI-based themes from GummySearch, the “News” and “Opportunities” themes. 

This is where people will be talking about news, events, and potential improvements!

Not All of Us Can Be the Next Uber…

…and that’s okay.

 In my perspective, we shouldn’t be approaching innovation and product development with the intention of creating “the next big thing.” 

Instead, our intention should be to meet customer needs incredibly well. Because even the big names started as a means of addressing problems no one else cared to solve at the time.

Once you’ve found market gaps to fill, it’s time to test them in the wild. I wrote a guide on idea validation that will be helpful when deciding which solutions are worth your time versus those you should rain-check. Give it a read!