how to check if your idea is already crowded - in under 30 minutes, all free
before my last two launches I wasted weeks building before checking who else was in the space. don’t be me. here’s the 30-min competitor check I do now, all free tools:
1. search PH archives (5 min)
search your keywords on Product Hunt. sort by launch date. note how the top 5 positioned themselves — the gaps in their taglines are your opening.
2. check who’s actually alive (10 min)
a launch from 2023 means nothing if the startup is dead. quick signals: are they hiring? shipped anything in the last 6 months? active changelog? I use exploreyc.com for this (free db of 8,600+ YC / a16z / PH startups with hiring status) but LinkedIn works too.
3. read the comments on competitor launches (10 min)
this is the goldmine. every complaint under a competitor’s PH launch is a free feature request for YOUR product. sort by most upvoted comments.
4. check HN sentiment (5 min)
search the space on hn.algolia.com. HN people are brutal — if there’s a fundamental objection to the category, they’ve written it down already.
if after 30 min you find 5+ alive, funded competitors and no positioning gap — congrats, you just saved yourself 3 months.
what’s your pre-launch research process? always looking to steal steps 👇
Replies
WebCurate.co
I usually see whether my idea is a "need" or a "want". Since there's a clear difference between these 2. If it's a need, I'll simply search whether competitors exist.
Sometimes a crowded market is a good sign because it proves there's demand. The harder part is finding a clear angle that makes people choose your product instead of the others.
add step 4 that took me longest to learn: talk to one person who tried the top 3 competitors and stopped. crowded doesnt mean occupied. crowded means 'everyone tried it and left' which is a bigger opportunity than an empty field. step 3 tells you what people complained about publicly. the DM to a churned user tells you what they wouldnt say publicly, which is usually the real gap. bonus: the exploreyc hiring-status filter is the same signal from the company side. quiet hiring = the market said no in ways the launch page doesnt show.