Why research before building
Most failed indie apps do not fail because the code was bad. They fail because the category was already captured by one dominant app, the keywords had no meaningful search volume, or the price point nobody pays was chosen by default.
Spending two or three hours on niche research before committing to a build is the single highest-leverage thing an indie developer can do. The process below uses only public data that Dispatch pulls automatically — no subscriptions, no manual spreadsheets.
Step 1 — Find categories where money is moving
Open App Store Charts in Dispatch and switch the chart type to Top Grossing. Set the country to your primary target market. Then cycle through categories — Business, Productivity, Health & Fitness, Finance, Education — and look at what is consistently in the top 50.
Top Grossing is more useful than Top Free or Top Paid here because it reflects sustained revenue, not just downloads or a one-time purchase spike. An app sitting at #12 in Top Grossing Finance has real subscribers or buyers coming back.
What you are looking for:
- A category where the top 50 contains several apps you have never heard of — that signals the category has demand but no single brand owns it
- Categories where the top apps look old or have low ratings — those incumbents are vulnerable
- A price gap — if everything in the top 20 is subscription-only, a quality one-time-purchase app may find an underserved audience
Once you spot an interesting category, click Scout this category → in the controls bar. Dispatch passes the category and country straight into Niche Scout.
Example: Health & Fitness, US, Top Grossing
The top 20 is dominated by subscription habit and workout trackers. But there is a cluster of sleep and breathing apps at #15–30 with modest ratings. That is worth scouting.
Example: Productivity, UK, Top Grossing
Several time-tracking and invoice apps sit in the top 50 with under 500 ratings and last updated 18 months ago. Low ratings + stale update cadence = high beatability.
Step 2 — Score the incumbents you would have to beat
In Niche Scout, type the niche term that describes what you want to build — keep it specific. "Habit tracker" is better than "Health apps". "Invoice generator for freelancers" is better than "Business".
Dispatch scans the top results and returns a beatability score (0–100) for each incumbent. The score is built from five signals:
- Rating velocity — is the app still receiving reviews, or has the stream dried up?
- Update cadence — apps untouched for 12+ months are labelled stale; 24+ months are abandoned
- Rating quality — an app with 3.1 stars and 8,000 reviews has a clear complaint pattern worth reading
- App size — a small app in the top 20 means users chose it despite limited features, which is a strong signal the core job is unmet
- Estimated installs — a rough band based on rating count and typical review-to-download ratios
The niche summary at the top gives you a verdict: Strong opportunity, Crowded but no clear king, or Saturated — one app owns this. A strong opportunity means most incumbents are stale or struggling. Crowded-but-no-king means you need a sharper angle. Saturated means move on.
Read the individual beatability reasons. Dispatch writes them in plain English: "Last updated 26 months ago — active indie developer would likely leapfrog this." That is a useful signal you can act on.
Step 3 — Confirm the keywords have traffic without being impossible to rank for
Open Keyword Research and type the terms you would use in your metadata. For each keyword Dispatch returns three numbers:
- Popularity (5–100) — how much search activity the term has, derived from the rating count of top results, total result count, and title-hit density. Higher is more traffic.
- Difficulty (0–100) — how hard it is to rank, based on how many established apps already target this term in their name or subtitle
- Opportunity — the inverse of difficulty. A high-opportunity keyword has meaningful popularity and weak competition.
What you want is a cluster of keywords with popularity above 40 and difficulty below 50. Those are the terms worth building around.
If your primary term scores difficulty 85, that does not mean you cannot enter the category — it means you will not rank for that exact phrase on launch day. Look at the suggested related terms. Often a more specific variation ("expense splitter for couples" vs "expense tracker") has similar popularity with half the difficulty.
Good signal
Popularity 62, Difficulty 38. A real niche with reachable keywords. Build it and invest in metadata from day one.
Warning signal
Popularity 71, Difficulty 89. High traffic but dominated by established players. You need a strong angle or a different keyword set to have a realistic launch path.
Putting it together: a worked example
Say you open Top Grossing → Education → UK in Dispatch. You notice several flashcard and language apps in the top 30, but they look dated. You click Scout this category.
Niche Scout shows "flashcard app" returns a verdict of Crowded but no clear king — beatability scores are 55–70 across the top 10. The top result has 3.4 stars and 1,200 reviews; the app hasn't updated in 14 months. That is beatable.
You open Keyword Research and type "flashcard maker". Popularity 58, Difficulty 44, Opportunity high. You try "study flashcards" — Popularity 67, Difficulty 61. You try "language flashcards" — Popularity 51, Difficulty 29. That last one is your entry point.
You now have a niche with a clear gap, beatable incumbents, and a reachable keyword cluster. That is a much better starting point than a hunch.
What this process does not replace
Data signals a gap. It does not guarantee users want what you build, or that your execution will be good enough. The research above tells you the door is open; building something people actually recommend to each other is still your job.
But finding out the door is already locked — before you spend six months building — is worth every minute of the research.