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.
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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 One-Question Widget: $44K MRR Hiding Inside AI Shopping Referrals
Shopify merchants see AI referral traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity convert 50% better than search, with no idea what those shoppers were actually trying to buy.
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.
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.
Ghost Cart: The Checkout That Buys Nothing ($6K MRR)
Korean dopamine sites draw 30,000 weekly users who fake-order food that never arrives. Aimed at regretted impulse buying, that ritual becomes a Chrome extension with real subscription math.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
The Flare File: A $39-a-Year Journal for Long COVID
Long COVID clinics are closing, the FDA just widened its general wellness lane, and 250,000 patients already pay for condition-specific software. A solo founder can ship in six weeks.
The Permission Layer: $375K ARR Hiding Inside Youth Sports Video
The NBA turned creators into official distribution. Youth sports operators own the footage and the sponsor money, with no system for releasing clips to creators safely.
The Recipe Clean Room: Licensed Food Data at $16K MRR
AI meal planners need clean recipe JSON. Publishers are blocking crawlers. The money sits in governed ingestion: provenance, licensing rules, and field-level confidence for content customers already own.
The $797 Bucket in Your Basement Has No Software
Households now spend $800 on emergency food kits and track them on paper. FEMA says 73% keep supplies; no app owns the rotation, expiration, and days-of-coverage layer.
The New-Market Launch Desk: $60K MRR From Restaurant Openings
Zaxbys opened in Manhattan, where nobody knows the brand. Regional restaurant chains now cross state lines faster than their reputations, and franchise grand-opening budgets are sitting unspent.
The Electric Bill Autopsy: A $36K MRR Micro-SaaS
U.S. households will spend $792 on electricity this summer and can't tell why. Bill parsing, Price-to-Compare data, and rate-case alerts make a $29-a-year forensic product.