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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!

Product ideation is what turns pain points into solutions that create happy, returning customers.

In this article, I’ll show you why product ideation matters, the stages involved, the techniques that work best, and how to validate your ideas before going all-in.

But first…

The #1 Problem with Product Ideation (and How It Can Be Misunderstood)

Many founders make the mistake of getting too excited about a product idea and building it without first validating it with potential customers. This often leads to disappointment when the product fails to gain traction, as it doesn’t address an existing need. Failing to understand customer needs is one of the top reasons why businesses fail.

Yes, ideation is supposed to be a fun and fulfilling process. But before that, it should be a data-driven approach based on relentless customer focus.

Why Product Ideation Matters

Innovation

Innovation comes in two forms: incremental, improving existing products, and radical, creating an entirely new market-disrupting product. Ideation is key to both, as it generates and refines ideas that push boundaries, whether through small improvements or groundbreaking changes.

For example, you could discuss how incremental ideation led to iterative improvements in digital painting apps, while radical ideation sparked the creation of entirely new categories like 3D sculpting tools.

In real life, you’d think of Uber as an incremental innovation: a better alternative to taxis, which were often too volatile and costly. You never knew what you’d end up paying by the time you reached your destination.

On the other hand, Facebook was a radical idea – it created a way to connect that we hadn’t seen before. 

Customer-Centricity

Many businesses fall into the trap of focusing on the product first and the customer second. It’s crucial to start by understanding the customer and the pains they’re facing, as solving problems later may require completely rethinking the product.

I like the straightforward way MailChimp put it: “Ideation strategies force businesses to think from the customer’s point of view to create products that meet their needs and address pain points.”

Here I want to add a disclaimer: develop products for the problems people are facing, and not products they think you should develop. Often, people will tell you what kind of product they need – only to realize that it won’t meet their needs at all. By all means, focus on their pains, but create the most effective way to resolve them. 

Competitive Advantage

In saturated markets, ideation helps you spot gaps and stand out with unique value propositions. 

When you keep a vigilant watch on the market, you know exactly which differentiator can make your product the no-brainer alternative. Be it cheaper, quicker, more convenient, functional, reliable, or durable.

The Stages of Product Ideation

While many articles focus on brainstorming as the first step in product ideation, the real starting point is problem identification.

I can tell you that the real first step is one a lot of product-focused founders ignore, after talking to over 200 early-stage founders who are validating, building, launching, and growing their products:

Problem Identification

Since this is the stage that will make or break the success of your product, I’ll spend a bit of extra time on it.

The first step for every product-focused founder, regardless of whether you’re improving an existing product or starting from scratch, should be problem identification. But for this article, we’ll consider a hypothetical scenario where someone is trying to build a successful product from zero.

So, where to begin?

I’d say: start by considering frustrations you’ve had in your areas of interest.

Let’s say you’re someone who’s struggled with digital painting apps throughout your art career. As a result, you want to build a solution to help artists like yourself. You know the problems you deal with, but you put on your customer-facing hat, remove bias from the process, and get to work.

You could go about researching problems to solve in a few ways:

• Googling your way through potential issues
• Analyzing reviews (both good and bad) from competitors
• Going guerrilla and having casual conversations with people in your target market
• Scrolling through platforms like Reddit

These are all great options, but the manual work can quickly become overwhelming. So you go to GummySearch to have all the above options in a single place – powered by raw, unfiltered Reddit conversations and reviews.

Since Reddit is bustling with digital artists and painters of all walks of life, you build an audience based on popular art subreddits such as r/Painting, r/DigitalPainting, and r/Art. All these communities have over 30 million members!

If you need help building your audience, check out my guide on finding subreddits.

That’s a huge number, and it would be a never-ending amount of work to sift through those communities and topics manually. 

But within GummySearch, you have an array of filters to choose from: Hot Discussions, Top Content, Solution Requests, Pain & Anger, and more.

Bonus tip: Ask AI to summarize the findings for you!

The research process isn’t linear because there are so many scoring-based themes. It’ll depend on what you’d like to discover.

So, if you wanted to cut down on research time, you’d try to discover which solutions people are already asking for inside “Solution Requests.” 

To your amazement, most mentions involve digital art devices, such as iPads, tablets, and others.

But still, you’ll want to validate the idea that the quest for better Digital Art solutions is currently a pressing problem. So you’d move on to “Hot Discussions” and look for Patterns (which GummySearch collects, sorts, and groups in a matter of seconds).

According to data, the outstanding topic is indeed digital art. Within it are several discussions about which affordable device is better, and which apps to use.

You already know that if you were to focus on a new device as a solution, you’d be competing with Apple iPads in terms of pricing and apps like ProCreate. However, you want to take an impartial look at what digital artists are saying about competing solutions.

That’s where you’d start a market gap analysis to uncover gaps such as usability issues, missing features, or accessibility concerns.

In the Audience dashboard, you’d go to “Products” to find out who your direct competitors are.

There you go! You can see the top products and look at reviews straight from GummySearch.

Thanks to your research, start thinking of problems to solve, and potential solutions. Let’s move on to the next step:

Idea Generation

Here, quantity matters more than quality. 

This stage is about exploring as many ideas as possible with methods like mind mapping, “How Might We?” questions, and good old brainstorming. So, even if you already have a product, it’s time to consider other solutions.

Start with the problems you’ve analyzed in your research. In the digital art scenario above, these could be:

• Problems when devices don’t work well with specific systems (e.g., MacBook Pro not being compatible with certain tablets).
• Devices having screens that are not bright enough or suffer from glare affect the quality of the drawing/painting experience.
• Artists resort to communities like Reddit to solve their problems, where they may not get the specialized answers they seek.

Now, here’s how you could start applying idea generation to solve the problems.

“How Might We?” Questions

Ask yourself or your team:

• How might we make the digital drawing process feel as natural as using physical tools?
• How might we help artists manage their workflow across different platforms more efficiently?
• How might we make collaborative art projects easier and more engaging?
• How might we help digital artists solve problems in real time and support each other throughout their creative process?

Brainstorming & Letting Loose

Set aside time to generate as many ideas as possible, no matter how wild.

• A holographic tool that lets artists sketch in 3D space using hand gestures.
• AI-powered brushes learn an artist’s style and suggest improvements in real time.
• A wearable glove that mimics the texture and feel of different brushes on a tablet screen.
• A community-based app featuring live Q&A forums or even direct connection features, so users can troubleshoot problems together in real time.

Mind Mapping

Use a central idea, like “digital art tools,” and branch out to related themes: ease of use, collaboration, creative inspiration, hardware, etc.

• Ease of use: Develop a voice-activated app that lets users change brush settings hands-free.
• Collaboration: A multiplayer canvas where multiple artists can co-create in real time.
• Creative inspiration: An app that analyzes trends and generates daily drawing prompts.

Realistically Evaluate the Ideas You’ve Generated

Now it’s the toughest time of product ideation: the reality check. It’s where you use prioritization frameworks such as RICE to evaluate ideas based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

Source: Plaky

Let’s say you need to measure the feasibility of a community-focused app for artists versus a brand-new digital art device. 

A community-based app offers higher reach, lower effort, and greater feasibility, making it a more practical choice compared to the resource-intensive hardware device, despite a new device having potential for high impact.

You decide to go for this idea. Great – but you’re not done yet!

Pre-Development Validation

Before you pour time and resources into development, you’ve got to make sure your idea is worth the effort. 

At this point, you’ve already used GummySearch to identify your audience’s frustrations, feature requests, market gaps, and more. The only difference is: that before, you were testing ideas. Now, you’ve already picked your idea, and you’re laser-focused on validating its potential. And GummySearch can help with that, too! 

Here’s how:

Once you have your idea down pat, it’s time to understand what your audience might be searching for on Reddit when looking for solutions just like yours. And there’s no better way to do this than by tracking the right keywords. 

On your GummySearch dashboard, click the 🔍icon in the left-hand sidebar to access the “Advanced Search” feature. 

Next, enter the audience you’d like to analyze and the keywords you’d like to explore. 

In our case, useful keywords would include “community apps” and “best digital art apps.” Think of this step as traditional keyword research for SEO, where you’re connecting existing searches to your solution. 

The awesome thing about this feature is that it’ll ping you whenever people start using your chosen keywords in a conversation. Just click the 🔔icon on the upper-right corner to track the keywords you judge important. 

This way, you don’t need to be on the edge of your seat, constantly checking if new mentions popped up. GummySearch will let you know! 

Watching real-time conversations unfold helps you confirm that your solution is something your audience is actively looking for. It’s a powerful way to validate your idea and confirm you’re on the right track before investing in development.

“Okay, but I’m new to this. How do I know the kinds of keywords to track for my specific product?” 

Don’t worry – I wrote a guide on keywords you should track on Reddit using the Advanced Search feature. If you haven’t already, give it a read. 

But also, open up to the following validation tactics:

Lean Methodologies for Product Ideation (and Validation)

Run quick and inexpensive tests to gauge demand. You can create landing pages describing your product, drive traffic to them, and measure interest. Crowdfunding campaigns are another great way to validate demand while securing funding.

Early Prototypes and MVPs

Once you’ve narrowed down your ideas, create a test and development plan.

Often, this begins with building a minimum viable product (MVP) to gather early feedback. For an app, this means focusing on the core feature – such as a community forum for artists to share their work and receive feedback – while skipping advanced functionalities for now.

Next, launch the MVP to a small group of target users (like a community of digital artists) and collect feedback through surveys or in-app forms. Use this input to refine the app and validate that the audience would pay for a product like it to solve their problems.

And there you have it! A brief yet comprehensive product ideation guide. If you’d like more insights, check out my other guides on finding problems to solve and validating your ideas. More guides are coming soon! 👀