Nine market searches found nine gaps. Seven were already occupied.
477 words · about 2 min
Ideas found by scanning the market for gaps: 0 for 9 survived. Measurement tools built because a decision we had to make needed the number: 3 for 3.
- How it was measured
- We sorted every rejected idea by the thing that actually killed it, and set those against the measurement tools this project built for its own use.
- Last checked
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We looked at nine possible markets using a written-down method: find out who owns the search results, list the big comparison sites already in the space, work out which ad networks the existing sites run, and check that the data behind it is measured rather than guessed at.
All nine were rejected. Seven died because somebody was already doing it.
Over the same period, this project built three measuring tools for its own use — a series of quarterly figures pulled out of archived vendor documents, a count of which ad networks run on sixteen domains, and a revenue index worked out from marketplace listings. All three worked. None of them existed anywhere beforehand.
0 for 9 against 3 for 3. The difference is not the picks.
The procedure is the problem
*Scanning for gaps finds gaps that look valuable.* The tools that turn them up — checking search results, listing what is already indexed, reading a page's HTML to see what it runs — are available to everyone, cost nothing, and take an afternoon. There are more people running them than there are gaps.
*A decision you actually had to make finds gaps that are valuable to at least one buyer*, proven by the fact that somebody needed the number, went looking, and could not buy it. That is a check on the competition passed by building rather than by inspecting.
Three things the scans kept getting wrong
An empty room and an abandoned room look identical from the doorway. One candidate's gap was entirely real — nobody was actively publishing in it. It had also been tried: one competitor's series had been frozen two years earlier, another had shrunk from several hundred pages to thirty-six. A space littered with capable people who quit is evidence that it does not pay, not evidence that it is open.
Some gaps are held shut on purpose. Another candidate's data was unpublished because the three organisations who hold it had each decided, in writing, not to publish it. No amount of diligence opens that.
And a claim anyone can make is not a defence. The last candidate was to be more rigorous than the people already there. We found a competitor already running a hundred thousand pages carrying the words "independently audited" — six of six pages we sampled claimed dozens of sources and named none of them. A reader cannot tell the two apart, and neither can the ad networks, one of which had already accepted theirs.
The question to ask first
Where did this idea come from? If the only evidence that anyone wants it is that the area looks underserved, you are running the procedure with the 0-for-9 record.
If instead somebody needed the number, could not buy it, and built it anyway — that is the procedure that went 3 for 3.
Tracked as SCREEN-FINDS-VISIBLE-GAPS, ABANDONED-LANE, BADGE-IS-FREE. If a number here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.