This article is written for people like myself: the independent software web developer. I'm active on X (find me on X as @geetfun), and like yourself, I keep up-to-date on the latest trends on what people are selling, which ones are successful (and which ones are not), and what niches seem to be bubbling up to the top.
The market has always felt saturated, and good ideas always seem hard to come by. Nonetheless, the phrase "The best time to start a business was 10 years ago; the second best time is now" still rings true.
There are generally two routes in finding profitable ideas:
Chase the trend
Fight the entrenched
Either of these paths have their own upsides and downsides. Let's talk about them.
Chase the trend
"Chase the trend" means exactly this. That is, you identify what is already working (to minimize the amount of time you're validating the idea) and is considered "hot" at the moment, and copying it. Ideally, you put your own spin on the idea to avoid the drama that comes when someone acuses you of copying 1:1 their product.
On X, this seems to be the predominant way most independent software developers operate. For example: boilerplate products and generative AI apps are, at the time of writing, the predominant ideas.
To do this successfully, you must work quickly. Ideally, you will need some pre-existing knowledge in that area to be able to move or learn quickly.
I have done this once about 10 years ago for a marketing app, and it worked beautifully. The growth was effortless and required practically no marketing.
The biggest downside of this approach, unfortunately, is that you do need the energy to keep moving. Because many indie developer around the globe will be chasing the same ideas, it is very easy to be forgotten and fade into obscurity if you don't keep improving your app.
To execute this idea, simply following top accounts on X is not enough. You need to be constantly reading and brainstorming. Analysis paralysis can definitely set in, and so you need to build a lot and launch a lot.
Effectively, you are treating each product as an experiment. You really won't know if it will work, but you don't care. This is definitely a high cadence path.
Fight the Entrenched
The internet has pretty much matured. It is highly unlikely you will find a niche that hasn't already been touched in some way.
When I started trying to make money online back in the early 2000's, the world's population was 6.3 billion. Now it has grown to 8.2 billion.
The fact is that you are competing with a lot more people now than ever. And anything that you could conjure up that you think might be original is likely not.
To build a business on top of ideas that already exist is what I call "Fight the Entrenched." Essentially, you are battling for marketshare against incumbents.
The product ideas here will revolve around rehashing, repackaging, and remarketing existing solutions as better ones. To do this succesfully, there are a few things that must be done.
First, you need to figure out how you efficiently and cost-effectively you can get visibility for your business. Because you are fighting against already established businesses/people/websites, you will need to find a way to get your version of the solution in front of the right audience.
Let's talk about SEO, because if your product is not "new" or "hot", intent-based search is probably the best bet.
To attain good SEO (and therefore good visibility), you might try building free tools around that niche and getting backlinks. Even then, it is not so easy as the market has gotten used to free tools that these tools are launched and are quickly forgotten.
You may also want to check out Ahref's Keyword Generator tool to find keyword ideas that have significant search volume but are (relatively) easier to attain decent ranking.
It is a time consuming endeavour for sure, and the whole thing will for sure feel like you're slowly panning for gold.
Success will definitely feel slow (if it comes), and the feedback loop will suffer because of this. With a larger feedback loop, acknowledging that a project has failed and you should move on to something else will take longer. Projects that should have been killed in favor of freeing up your time and energy for something else will take forever to die. For these reasons, I am a bit hesitant to pursue this path unless I am confident I can make it work.
Closing thoughts
One thing that should be immediately clear is that both of the above approaches require some element of luck.
At the end of the day, you really don't know what will work. If you did, you could head straight to the winning product idea and skip the whole guess and try game.
Both approaches will feel different, however. "Chasing the trend", when it works, will definitely provide that dopamine hit and provide you with the signal that you should continue pursuing it. However, it is easier to burn out if, only multiple tries, you don't succeed.
Whichever path you take, get ready for the ups and downs of each approach and understand how different it will feel getting to success.