The product people don't know they need.

Getting Started · 4 min read

A client came in with an idea for a learning app aimed at a specific profession. During his own training, he'd searched YouTube, TikTok, Google, everything. Nothing existed. No apps. No courses. No study tools. Tens of thousands of people go through this training every year in Australia alone, and there was literally nothing built for them.

That sounds like a massive opportunity. And it is. But it creates a strange problem: if nobody knows the product exists, how do you validate demand?

No search volume doesn't mean no demand

The standard advice for validating an app idea is to check search trends. See if people are googling it. See if there's competition. If you find competitors, that's proof of demand. If you find search volume, that's proof of interest.

But some products exist in a gap that nobody has named yet. Nobody searched for "ride sharing app" before Uber existed. Nobody searched for "language learning game" before Duolingo. The demand was there. People wanted easier transport and better language learning. They just didn't know to search for it in app form.

If you're a domain expert who's lived the problem, and you searched for a solution and found nothing, that's a signal. Not the kind that shows up in Google Trends, but the kind that matters.

The market exists. The category doesn't.

The client's potential user base was easy to size. Tens of thousands of people training in this field every year, across two countries. The problem was real. The frustration was documented. The workarounds (outdated textbooks, classroom-only instruction, paper-based tests) were clearly inadequate.

The market existed. What didn't exist was the category. Nobody had built a product for it yet, so there was no search term, no App Store category, and no competitor to point to. That's not a weakness. That's a first-mover advantage. But it means you can't use traditional demand validation.

There's research on this. Kim and Mauborgne studied 108 business launches for Harvard Business Review (2004) and found that the 14% that created entirely new categories generated 61% of total profits. The biggest returns don't come from fighting for space in a crowded market. They come from building something nobody else has built yet.

Ship fast and let the product validate itself

When nobody is searching for your product, you can't A/B test landing pages or measure click-through rates on ads. The validation has to come from the product itself. Build the smallest useful version. Get it in front of real users. Watch what happens.

This client had four or five people in his professional network who were the exact target user. They'd test it. They'd tell their colleagues. If the product is genuinely useful, word of mouth does the work that marketing can't do yet. And once people start using it, you'll have the data to run ads, optimise your App Store listing, and target the right keywords.

The validation isn't the survey. It's the first hundred users telling someone else about it.

Related blog posts:

How to validate your app idea →

What if nobody downloads it? →

The budget that tells you the market is real →