Niche Radar

Scored on the evidence below, against CENTS as we've adapted it plus a Buffett-style moat reading of every rival — the same referee for every idea, including the ones we generate ourselves. The verdict follows the arithmetic: we never relabel a score to make it read better, and the weakest commandment is always named. The exact rubric stays in-house so the scale can't be written for.

At $99/mo (assumed category price), you need 842 subscribers for a $1M/yr pace.

Nearest tracked rivals on that curve:

• Brand24 / Mention (social listening incumbents) — Established agency-grade listening with legal data pipelines, dashboards and multi-seat pricing agencies already budget for.
• GummySearch / F5Bot-style Reddit monitors — Reddit-native niche discovery already exists cheaply, compressing your price to near-zero differentiation.
• MarkupX Brands / EarlySEO ($100k MRR, CENTS 6.8) — Proven operator in adjacent SEO/marketing intel with distribution and revenue to bolt on mention monitoring.

• No Reddit demand signals found for these keywords — zero primary complaint evidence for this specific wedge.
• No funded companies tracked in/near the space, so no investor validation of the niche framing.
• Radar's 3 similar products skew failure-ward: two stalled at $1k–$2k MRR; only one unrelated $100k MRR outlier.
• General market knowledge shows agencies do pay for social listening ($79–$399/mo tiers), but that spend flows to incumbents, not niche-community scanners.

• Facebook has no groups API for third-party monitoring; scraping private/niche groups breaches ToS and invites account bans or legal action.
• Reddit's 2023 API repricing already killed a generation of monitoring tools; terms can change again unilaterally.
• Feature, not product — listening is a checkbox inside Sprout, Brand24 and even ChatGPT-plus-RSS workflows.
• Agency churn is brutal: monitoring dashboards get logged into twice then cancelled when the client retainer ends.

• Reddit Data API pricing/policy — One rate-limit or per-call price change makes real-time monitoring unaffordable overnight, as it did in 2023.
• Facebook/Meta platform enforcement — No sanctioned groups API means detection of scraping ends half your product and can nuke your accounts.
• Incumbent bundling — Brand24 or Sprout shipping niche-community tracking in an existing tier removes your reason to exist.

• Cannot verify whether agencies would pay for niche-community coverage specifically versus mainstream social listening they already buy.
• Cannot tell what current Reddit API commercial terms would cost at your query volume, which decides unit economics.
• Cannot assess whether any compliant Facebook groups data source exists for your target verticals.

Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-08-03.

Drop mentions entirely; sell one vertical's content-gap report (e.g. Reddit threads with unanswered buyer questions) as a done-for-you weekly brief agencies resell to clients.

Cheapest next step: DM 15 niche-vertical agency owners offering a hand-built one-off community gap report for $149 and count who pays this week.

Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 4.6 — different vertical, audience, model, or wedge. Same harsh scale. Pro feature.

This one got a skip. Every morning the engine files one mined gap that could be a yes — idea, score, and what holds it back, free at 7am AEST. Unedited, like this verdict.

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Weekly re-scan against the live corpus. If the market moves this ShipScore by a point, or flips the verdict, you hear about it. Free while we're small.