Research playbooks01
Your app idea needs a rival, not a pep talk
A practical competitor worksheet for turning an exciting app idea into a decision you can defend.
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Small apps.
Big questions.
A strange little utility. A stubborn user problem. A business hiding in plain sight. Pull up a chair.
Start here · Research playbooks
Your app idea needs a rival, not a pep talk
A practical competitor worksheet for turning an exciting app idea into a decision you can defend.
Open the notebookThe reading room 100
Research playbooks02
Before you build the app, try doing its job
The cheapest useful prototype may be a service, a worksheet or one carefully chosen result.
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Research playbooks03
A niche is a room you can find the door to
A small audience is useful only if you can identify it, reach it and solve something it cares about.
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Research playbooks04
Three apps, one job, fewer distractions
A fair comparison starts with the same task, not a feature checklist borrowed from the biggest competitor.
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Research playbooks05
Nobody built it. Is that good news?
How to tell an overlooked problem from a market that keeps politely declining to exist.
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Research playbooks06
The same app can live in two different worlds
Why country, language and storefront belong in every serious app comparison.
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Research playbooks07
A launch spike is a beginning, not a business
How to investigate a new app without mistaking its opening weekend for lasting demand.
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Research playbooks08
Copy the question. Earn your own answer.
What to investigate before building an app inspired by somebody else’s product.
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Research playbooks09
Turn your research notebook into a bet you can test
A simple way to move from interesting observations to a falsifiable product experiment.
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Research playbooks10
The one-page memo that can save you a month
A founder’s go/no-go worksheet for deciding what deserves to be built next.
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Tools & decisions11
Buy the question you need answered
The best app research tool depends on whether you are choosing a niche, improving a listing or studying acquisition.
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Tools & decisions12
A trial account is a laboratory, not a buffet
A seven-question test for deciding whether an app intelligence subscription will earn its keep.
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Tools & decisions13
Your first research stack can fit in five browser tabs
A practical way to combine public store listings, reviews, publisher sites and your own notes.
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Tools & decisions14
The subscription drawer is getting crowded
How to budget for research tools without buying the same answer three times.
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Tools & decisions15
When your spreadsheet outgrows the browser
The questions that make broader app intelligence worth evaluating—and the questions it still cannot answer for you.
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Tools & decisions16
Peekly vs AppKittie: bring a research task
A practical comparison checklist for two products aimed at finding interesting mobile apps.
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Tools & decisions17
AppRill vs Peekly: start with the evidence you need
Where to draw the comparison today, and why planned features should not get credit.
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Tools & decisions18
AppRill vs AppKittie: the workflow is the comparison
A founder’s way to compare discovery, evidence and repeatable monitoring without a wall of checkmarks.
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Tools & decisions19
Appfigures vs Sensor Tower: size the question first
How a small studio can evaluate broader intelligence without borrowing an enterprise team’s shopping list.
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Tools & decisions20
ASO research and review operations are different jobs
Why AppTweak-style store research and AppFollow-style feedback workflows deserve separate evaluation criteria.
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Money, decoded21
The revenue screenshot forgot to pay the bills
A small business can look rich in a screenshot and feel poor in a bank account. Here is the missing worksheet.
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Money, decoded22
A good month is not automatically MRR
Recurring revenue measures an ongoing subscription base. A sales spike measures a good month. Both are useful; they answer different questions.
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Money, decoded23
The annual-plan confetti comes with twelve months of work
Upfront cash can fund a small app. It also creates a service obligation that deserves its own budget.
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Money, decoded24
Put a confidence interval around your excitement
An estimated earnings number can help you investigate an app. It cannot carry the whole investment decision.
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Money, decoded25
A $99 in-app purchase tells you the price of a door
Seeing a product in a purchase list does not tell you how many people walked through it.
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Money, decoded26
The money may enter through a different door
App-store revenue can miss part of a business. Map the payment paths before comparing companies.
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Money, decoded27
Two screenshots do not automatically make a trend
A growth calculation needs comparable observations, not just two numbers that happen to look related.
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Money, decoded28
An asking price is a conversation starter
A marketplace listing can reveal what a seller wants. It cannot tell you what a buyer eventually paid.
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Money, decoded29
Lifetime customers keep having Tuesdays
A lifetime deal brings cash forward. Your infrastructure bill keeps its normal schedule.
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Money, decoded30
$3,000 MRR has a customer count hiding inside it
Turn a revenue target into a pricing, acquisition and retention experiment you can actually operate.
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Listening to users31
The angriest review is not automatically your roadmap
A repeatable review sample beats a folder full of dramatic screenshots.
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Listening to users32
One star can mean “please fix this,” not “I will switch”
Complaints reveal friction. Switching intent needs another question.
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Listening to users33
Read the love letters before writing the breakup app
Positive reviews reveal what a competitor already does well enough to make replacement difficult.
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Listening to users34
Give your review spreadsheet better nouns
A useful tagging system describes tasks, failures and consequences instead of filing everything under “UX.”
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Listening to users35
Did the update break something, or did your sample change?
Version-aware review analysis helps separate a release problem from a noisy change in who left feedback.
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Listening to users36
Your English review sample may be wearing blinkers
Language filters make research manageable. They also determine whose problems you can hear.
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Listening to users37
Your review-summary bot needs a skeptical editor
Use AI to organize a large sample, then check whether its tidy themes survive contact with the original text.
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Listening to users38
Ask about the last bad Tuesday
Past behavior makes a better interview than “Would you use my app?”
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Listening to users39
Turn a complaint into an acceptance test
A review becomes actionable when you can describe the behavior that would make the problem go away.
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Listening to users40
A polite review can describe a disaster
Sentiment measures tone. Severity measures consequences. Your roadmap needs to know the difference.
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Apps worth studying41
Forest gave the timer something to lose
A virtual tree makes an abstract focus session visible. The useful lesson is about meaning, not copying the tree.
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Apps worth studying42
The bird app’s magic is bigger than the microphone
Merlin is a useful reminder that an impressive recognition interface can sit on years of data and specialist work.
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Apps worth studying43
A llama walked into a utility app
Waterllama makes a routine interaction visually distinctive. That is a design observation, not a medical claim.
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Apps worth studying44
Finch makes the checklist care back
A companion changes the tone of a task list. Builders should study the relationship without inventing clinical or revenue outcomes.
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Apps worth studying45
The flight app is selling the next useful minute
Flighty illustrates why freshness and timing can matter more than the number of fields on a dashboard.
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Apps worth studying46
The cleaning app has two jobs, and one is remembering
Tody points to a useful niche question: who is carrying the plan in their head?
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Apps worth studying47
The bill-splitting app is also an awkward-conversation app
Shared expenses are arithmetic wrapped in a relationship. A good product has to handle both.
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Apps worth studying48
The collector does not want a new data-entry hobby
Discogs illustrates why finding the right item can matter more than drawing the perfect collection grid.
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Apps worth studying49
Those tiny planes have a very large supply chain
Flightradar24 is a reminder that the visible map may be the easy part of a data product.
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Apps worth studying50
Your competitor might not be trying to make money like you
Merlin offers a useful reminder: a popular free product can have a different mission and funding model from your startup.
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Growth & creative51
The ad is running. The profit is not visible.
An active creative is evidence of a campaign, not a public receipt for its return on spend.
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Growth & creative52
Take the ad apart before you admire it
A six-part creative note makes competitor research easier to turn into an original experiment.
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Growth & creative53
A good hook opens the door. It should lead to the right room.
Make the first line interesting without making the product pay for an exaggerated promise.
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Growth & creative54
Is that advertiser actually the app you are studying?
Publisher names, agency pages and lookalike brands can turn a neat ad dataset into a misleading one.
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Growth & creative55
A million views can still be the wrong million
A popular app video may reveal curiosity, entertainment or a buying problem. Find out which one.
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Growth & creative56
Write the weird-app post with receipts
You can make app research entertaining without making up the money.
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Growth & creative57
Show the annoying bit before the magic bit
A short product demo needs a recognizable problem, a real action and a result the viewer can understand.
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Growth & creative58
A tiny creative budget needs a sharp question
Test one meaningful uncertainty at a time so a small experiment can teach you something.
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Growth & creative59
Your swipe file is quietly expiring
Saved media, advertiser context and observation dates need maintenance if you want research to remain useful.
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Growth & creative60
When three signals agree, check whether they share a parent
Several dashboards can repeat the same underlying observation. Count evidence, not logos.
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Products people keep61
Your onboarding is asking for a relationship before a first date
Let people understand the job your app can do before asking them to invest in setup.
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Products people keep62
Where should the paywall stand? Start with the promise.
A paywall belongs at a clear commercial boundary, with enough context for a customer to decide.
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Products people keep63
A packing app does not need you every Tuesday
Measure return behavior at the rhythm of the job, not the rhythm your dashboard happens to prefer.
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Products people keep64
The internet left. Did your app take the work with it?
Offline behavior is a product decision that shows up at inconvenient moments.
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Products people keep65
An empty dashboard owes the user an explanation
No results can mean no matches, missing coverage, stale data or a failed request. Give each state its own sentence.
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Products people keep66
Every notification borrows a little attention
Send an alert when it helps someone act, not merely because a database row changed.
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Products people keep67
The tiny gray label is not a premium feature
A utility app should remain useful with larger text, a keyboard and a less-than-perfect day.
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Products people keep68
Let the customer leave with their dignity and their data
Cancellation is part of the product experience people remember and describe to others.
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Products people keep69
Your support inbox is part of cost of goods sold
A ten-minute problem repeated across customers can turn a cheap app into an expensive job.
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Products people keep70
The launch checklist should be boring enough to work
A release is ready when the important customer paths survive ordinary failure, not when the build turns green.
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Search & publishing71
The keyword is not the article
Choose a reader decision before choosing how many times to mention the search phrase.
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Search & publishing72
Your blog does not need five versions of the same advice
Separate genuinely different decisions; merge pages that only change the wording of the query.
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Search & publishing73
Write something an agent can quote without losing the point
Clear scope, nearby sources and explicit assumptions help both humans and automated readers interpret a claim.
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Search & publishing74
The sitemap is a map, not a reservation
Submitting URLs helps discovery. It does not reserve a place in search results.
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Search & publishing75
Schema is a label maker, not a credibility machine
Structured data should describe what the page actually contains, including who wrote it and what evidence it offers.
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Search & publishing76
Your article can sell without interrupting itself
A useful next step often works better than surrounding the reader with unrelated signup requests.
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Search & publishing77
Give the blog a scoreboard beyond page views
Measure the path from a useful article to a useful product action, while keeping small samples in perspective.
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Search & publishing78
A dated article can be honest. An undated one can be quietly wrong.
Plan refresh work around claims that change, rather than repainting the publication date.
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Search & publishing79
The illustration is allowed to be a metaphor
A beautiful cover can invite curiosity. It should not pretend to prove the article.
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Search & publishing80
The last reader before publication should be a little difficult
A separate review pass catches the claims that sounded better while you were writing them.
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Data you can use81
A million app rows can still miss the app you need
Catalogue size, usable metadata and fresh observations are three different measures of coverage.
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Data you can use82
Ranked number one where, exactly?
A chart position needs a store, country, category, chart type and observation time to mean anything useful.
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Data you can use83
An app name is a nickname, not a primary key
Stable identifiers keep research attached to the right product when names, publishers and listings change.
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Data you can use84
Last checked is not the same as last changed
A timestamp should explain what happened, not merely make a record look current.
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Data you can use85
A watchlist should contain a reason to watch
Saving fifty apps is easy. Knowing what change would matter is the useful part.
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Data you can use86
Export the evidence, not just the attractive column
A useful research CSV should survive being separated from the dashboard that explained it.
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Data you can use87
The API bill is part of the research question
Bounded queries, caching and a stopping rule can keep exploratory research from becoming an accidental subscription business for your supplier.
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Data you can use88
Unknown is a data value worth defending
A blank observation should not quietly become zero, false or “no activity.”
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Data you can use89
Bring ten awkward apps to the demo
A practical benchmark reveals more than asking a vendor whether its data is accurate.
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Data you can use90
A methodology page should answer the embarrassing questions
Explain where the data comes from, what it misses and how a reader should interpret it.
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Ideas to pressure-test91
The missing screw may be a better niche than “productivity”
A specialist inventory app needs to solve a real retrieval problem, not merely display somebody’s collection.
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Ideas to pressure-test92
The washing machine has paperwork. Nobody knows where.
A household equipment notebook is worth testing only if it helps at the moment something breaks.
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Ideas to pressure-test93
The band remembers the song. Nobody remembers the note.
A rehearsal notebook could earn its place by connecting feedback to the next practice session.
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Ideas to pressure-test94
The checklist has to survive dirty hands and no signal
A narrow field workflow can be a useful app niche when ordinary forms fail in the actual working environment.
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Ideas to pressure-test95
The event kit went home with someone. Which someone?
Shared equipment is a small coordination problem with a very physical failure mode.
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Ideas to pressure-test96
The plant does not need another reminder. The flatmates might.
Shared responsibility creates a different product question from personal plant tracking.
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Ideas to pressure-test97
Another packing list needs a better reason to exist
The useful niche may be a specific trip constraint rather than a longer list of items.
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Ideas to pressure-test98
The AI button needs a job description
A model call becomes a product when the surrounding workflow makes its output reliable and useful.
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Ideas to pressure-test99
Low effort should describe Tuesday, not launch night
A quick build can still become a demanding business if the data, support and distribution never settle down.
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Ideas to pressure-test100
Put these app ideas in the “not yet” drawer
Some ideas need evidence, access or an operating model before they deserve a build sprint.
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