What counts as a market gap
A gap is not an absence of products. It is a mismatch between what a definable group of people needs and what they can currently buy. That distinction matters because crowded categories contain the most gaps: the more products exist, the more precisely you can see which customers each one ignores.
Five kinds of gap
- Feature gap — the product exists and does not do the one thing this group needs. The most common, and the easiest for an incumbent to close.
- Price gap — the product does the job at a price this segment cannot justify. Durable when the incumbent's cost structure prevents them following you down.
- Segment gap — the product is built for a larger or more technical customer, and the smaller one cannot use it. Often the most durable of the five.
- Geography and language gap — the product works but is not localised, does not accept local payment, or ignores local regulation. Visible in app-store reviews faster than anywhere else.
- Quality gap — the product covers the need on paper and fails in use. Read the two-star reviews; one-star is often the wrong purchase, two-star is the real complaint.
How to run the analysis
Pick a category and list the five products a buyer would actually consider. For each, collect their pricing tiers and their negative reviews from the last year. Then group the complaints by what they are really about — not by product — and count how many of the five products each complaint applies to. A complaint that applies to all five is a gap in the category. A complaint about one product is a competitor's bug.
This is the step that separates a gap analysis from a competitor teardown, and it is the step that gets skipped because it requires reading complaints about products you do not care about.
Scoring a gap
Score each surviving gap on four things: how many distinct people it affects, how much it costs each of them, how many of the incumbents share the failing, and how hard it would be for one of them to close it next quarter. The fourth is the one founders skip, and it is the one that decides whether the gap is a business or a feature request you are executing on someone else's behalf.
When a gap is a trap
Some gaps are empty for structural reasons. The customers cannot be reached economically. The regulation makes serving them expensive. The segment churns so fast that acquisition never pays back. Or the work is genuinely unpleasant and everyone who tried it left. Before celebrating an empty space, spend an hour finding out who tried and what happened to them — the failures are usually documented in the same forums as the complaints.