App Market Discovery

App Market Discovery

Search broadly enough to avoid anchoring on the first plausible idea. Deliver ranked opportunity hypotheses for later validation; do not call them validated.

Define the search mandate

Record:

• target Apple platforms, devices, territories, and languages;
• consumer, prosumer, or business preference;
• budget, deadline, team, and desired operator autonomy;
• acceptable acquisition and monetization models;
• whether interviews, sales, regulated review, moderation, physical service, or marketplaces are allowed;
• capabilities or risks the user explicitly excludes.

If constraints are missing, make reversible assumptions and label them. Do not narrow the world to categories already mentioned in the conversation.

Build a diverse opportunity universe

Generate candidates across unrelated jobs and industries. Look for:

• expensive, frequent, urgent, error-prone, or emotionally important work;
• underserved workflows hidden inside generic tools, paper, spreadsheets, desktop-only software, or fragmented services;
• changes in Apple hardware, frameworks, regulation, demographics, or business behavior;
• markets with reachable buyers and observable purchase intent;
• jobs where camera, microphone, location, offline work, Pencil, sensors, Shortcuts/App Intents, on-device processing, or Apple ecosystem continuity materially improve the outcome.

Exclude obvious clones, generic AI wrappers, repackaged websites, speculative network-effect markets without a liquidity plan, and ideas whose service burden violates the mandate.

Research the market landscape

Use current direct evidence:

• App Store queries by territory, ratings, review recency, screenshots, pricing, IAP/subscriptions, and update cadence;
• competitor sites, help centers, changelogs, public pricing, and positioning;
• search demand, forums, professional communities, complaints, procurement pages, and job posts;
• credible industry, demographic, and platform sources;
• current Apple features that create, commoditize, or eliminate an advantage;
• distribution channels where the buyer can actually be reached.

Save the date, query, source URL, observation, and inference separately. Ratings do not prove revenue; market size does not prove reachability.

Rank without pretending certainty

Score 0–10 with explicit weights:

| Criterion | Suggested weight | |---|---:| | Pain, urgency, or measurable ROI | 20% | | Willingness-to-pay evidence | 15% | | Reachable distribution | 15% | | Recurrence and retention | 10% | | Competitive opening | 10% | | Apple-native advantage | 10% | | Build and operating feasibility | 10% | | Platform/regulatory risk | 5% | | Expansion or defensibility | 5% |

For every finalist, search specifically for the strongest reason not to build it: dominant/free substitutes, recent entrants, platform bundling, low frequency, high CAC, weak switching incentive, moderation, liability, regulated claims, or costly human operations. Re-score after the adversarial pass.

Hand off to validation

Return:

• broad candidate matrix and source ledger;
• top three opportunities with distinct users/jobs;
• chosen recommendation only when requested;
• current alternatives, native advantage, monetization and distribution hypotheses;
• strongest falsifiers and unanswered questions;
• a clear statement that discovery has ranked ideas but has not validated demand or market fit.

Invoke $app-idea-validator next for the selected idea. Do not run behavioral experiments or silently begin development inside this skill.

Read references/opportunity-map.md for the output structure.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: MartinPuli
• Source: MartinPuli/createAnApp
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.