Pokémon's Back-Room Problem Is a $79-a-Month Shopify App
Seven-Eleven's July franchise scandal exposed a gap Shopify POS never covered: what happens to limited inventory between the receiving dock and the shelf. Trading card shops feel it first.
IC: Market Pricing
Pricing and inventory signals that show margin opportunities and arbitrage.
The $79 Crash-Test Dummy for SaaS Signup Flows
Synthetic-user startups sell predictions that research keeps disproving. The narrower play: browser agents that crash-test a SaaS signup flow before launch and return reproducible defects, not opinions.
The $1,500 Receipt: Where Event Matchmaking Actually Pays
A Union Square photo booth matched 3,500 strangers with printed receipts. Event matchmaking software sells for $19.99; the staged reveal that organizers actually book bills like a photo booth.
Crocs-Style Charms for the $150 Fan Europe Can't Stop Carrying
Shark's $149.99 ChillPill became Europe's summer status object, with TikTok Shop sales up 1,200%. Owners want theirs personalized, and nobody sells the attachment point Crocs proved is worth $271M.
The Airbnb Incident Recorder: $29 Reports for Panicked Hosts
Airbnb publishes its ranking factors but never confirms whether your listing appeared in a given search. Hosts edit blind, guess wrong, and blame shadowbans. Someone should be selling the logs.
CreativeOps for the App Store: The $25K MRR Coordination Layer
Apple's fall Creative Assets rollout splits App Store creative from app releases, leaving ASO agencies to coordinate 50 localizations and 70 custom product pages with no software built for it.
The AI Mystery Shopper for Restaurants ($9,750 MRR)
Twenty-two percent of diners now ask AI where to eat. Most restaurants have no idea what ChatGPT and Gemini say back, or which broken listing is to blame.
Book Before Feed: The iOS Blocker That Demands Proof
Screen-time blocking is a commodity, and a solo developer already shipped camera-verified unlocking to nine App Store ratings. The gap isn't engineering. It's owning a ritual people will film.
The $5,455 Song: YouTube Creator Music's Hidden Bill
YouTube stops selling Creator Music licenses on August 10, pushing editing teams toward revenue-share tracks. Nobody prices that decision before the cut is locked.
Austin's Messy Permit Data Is Worth $10K a Month
Building permit records sit behind 91,438 local governments in incompatible formats. Shovels raised $6.5 million normalizing them nationally. One metro, ten jurisdictions, and provenance is the opening left.
7,000 Agencies Automated the Dashboard. Nobody Automated the Paragraph
Agencies automated the PPC dashboard, then Meta and Google rewrote attribution three times in 2026. The monthly client explanation is still written by hand, and somebody has to sign it.
The $129 Shelf: GLP-1's Missing Medicine Cabinet
Ten million Americans store Ozempic and Zepbound pens next to the milk. Pharma made the drug, Whirlpool made the fridge, and nobody designed the six inches in between.
The Overflow Desk: $18,900 a Month From HVAC's Declined Calls
HVAC shops decline booked-intent calls all summer while competitors sit on open service windows. Contractor referrals already happen informally in every metro. The question is who formalizes them and collects.
The $50 Line Sitter: Drop Software for Viral Bakeries
Line sitters charge $50 to stand outside Butterfield Market for an $11 dot cake. Viral bakeries ration sellouts with paper tickets, and no software owns the allocation.
The $30,000 Spreadsheet Breweries Don't Keep
Pennsylvania's Brews to Barns Act pays brewers 16 cents a dry pound for spent grain donations. Almost none of them keep the records the credit requires.
The $55K MRR Kill Switch in Front of OpenAI
Flat-rate AI products pay variable inference bills with no ceiling. OpenAI softened its own spend cap, Portkey gates budgets to Enterprise, and LiteLLM's enforcement has open bugs.
The Thrift Aisle Copilot: A $30K/Month Resale Tool
Thrift resellers lose two hours a trip building eBay searches in the aisle. Every scanner app automated the listing instead. The sourcing decision is still unclaimed.
The SKU Resurrection Desk: $25K/Month From Dead Products
TRIANGL's neoprene relaunch sold out because the demand was already visible on eBay and Depop. Most DTC brands have the same evidence sitting in discontinued catalogs, unread.
The Hotel Data Cleanup: $52K MRR from 150 Boutique Properties
Radisson hired Accenture to clean its property data before launching inside ChatGPT. Independent hotels face the same broken rooms, fees, and policy records with no consultant coming.
Meta Made the Chatbot Free. India's Boutiques Still Lose Orders.
India runs $65 billion of e-retail through chat, and Meta's free WhatsApp agent answers questions it can't verify. Instagram boutiques still close orders from a spreadsheet.
The Relocation Math Zillow Won't Show You ($20K MRR)
Zillow shipped climate risk on every listing, then pulled it. Nobody calculates whether a raise survives housing, childcare, commuting, and homeowners insurance in one specific county.
The Bid Radar: $60K MRR in Data Center Prequalification
Data center construction is pulling trillions through electrical and mechanical trades, but most regional contractors lose the package before pricing ever starts. The gate isn't price. It's prequalification paperwork.
PepsiCo Pays $5,000 a Month for Food Trends. Bakeries Get Instagram.
Enterprise food trend platforms sell signal to PepsiCo at $5,000 a month. The 9,112 independent bakery cafés running limited-time offers get nothing they can actually bake.
YouTube Deleted 130,000 Channels. The Expensive Niches Survived.
YouTube's enforcement wave removed 130,000 mass-produced channels and left the highest-CPM niches nearly empty. Small-business tax pays $15 to $30 per thousand impressions, and almost nobody is there.