How to choose a good niche
Why the niche you type drives everything, and how to write one that produces good results
Everything downstream is built from this one line. It becomes the searches we run, the discussions we pull, the problems we find, and the ideas we score against them. Give the pipeline a sharp niche and it has something concrete to chew on. Give it a vague one and you get fog back: ten shades of the same forgettable idea. So it's worth a minute of thought before you hit go.
What a good niche has
The things that make a real micro-SaaS work are mostly the same things that make a niche produce good results here. A few are worth being deliberate about.
A specific audience, named by what they do. "Fitness" is not a niche. "People over 30 taking up a sport for the first time" is. The narrower and more concrete the group, the more concrete the problems we surface, and concrete problems are the ones you can actually build for. Broad inputs hand you a wide field of bland. Customers also pay more for a tool built for their exact situation than for a general one that almost fits.
A problem software can touch. We skip the lifestyle and structural stuff on purpose: loneliness, motivation, "the industry is broken." No tool fixes those, and scoring a problem software can't solve wastes your time. The niches that produce buildable ideas sit on a concrete, recurring, software-shaped friction. A workflow that's tedious. Data that's scattered. A decision that's hard to make.
Data a solo dev can actually get. Most people miss this one, and it's where our checks are strictest. A lot of good-sounding ideas die on a simple question: where does the data come from? If the information a tool would run on sits behind a login, is only reachable one record at a time, or doesn't exist in public, we cap the idea honestly rather than pretend. Open-source AI models are a clean example. Configs, benchmarks, and hardware specs are all public, so the ideas come back buildable. A niche whose value depends on private user data behind someone else's wall does not.
People who feel the pain, not people who watch it. We learned this one the hard way. "Esports fans" sounds like a niche, but most of that discussion is spectators reacting to matches. "Competitive players grinding ranked" is the same world, except now the chatter is full of real friction. Aim at the people doing the thing and paying the cost, not the audience standing around it.
A buying signal somewhere in the room. The strongest niches have people already spending: naming a paid tool they tolerate, complaining about hours lost, mentioning a budget. That's commercial intent, and it lifts the scores honestly. A purely hobbyist niche where nobody pays for anything scores lower. That's the system being straight with you, not pessimistic.
How to write it
Once you know the niche, write it as a sentence about the people and what they're stuck on. Not a product.
- Name the audience and their situation. "Open-source AI model users trying to pick the right model for a task on their own hardware" tells us who they are, what they're doing, and where it gets hard. "AI" tells us nothing.
- Describe the job, not a solution. Resist typing "a Chrome extension that...". The moment you name the product, you've done our job for us and boxed out better answers. Say where people get stuck and let the ideas come from the evidence.
- Get the width right. Too broad ("productivity," "small business") and the searches scatter. Too narrow ("a tool for left-handed Vue developers in Berlin") and there isn't enough public discussion to learn from. You want a group big enough to be talking online, specific enough to share a real problem.
- Lead with the doers. If your phrasing could just as easily describe spectators or fans, tighten it toward the people with their hands on the problem.
Good and weak niches, side by side
"AI tools" Too broad. No specific audience, no shared problem, generic ideas. "Open-source AI model users picking the best model for a task on their own hardware" Specific doers, a real recurring problem, and the data (specs, benchmarks) is public. "Sim racers researching affordable cockpit setups" Narrow, active community, genuine purchasing friction, public product data. "Fitness enthusiasts" Vague, and a lot of the pain is motivation and lifestyle that software can't touch. "Make money online" A wish, not an audience. Thin evidence, forgettable ideas.What to keep in mind
A good niche can't guarantee a good idea, but a vague one almost guarantees a forgettable one. When a report comes back thin, the fix is usually upstream: the niche was too broad, aimed at the wrong people, or built on data nobody can get. Tighten the input and run it again.