Where the opportunities are right now

Most people look for opportunity by asking "what’s growing?" That’s a reasonable question, but it’s a crowded one — everyone is looking at the same growth charts. A quieter, less contested question is "what just disappeared, and why?"

Absence is a signal too

When a product shuts down, it leaves behind something useful: proof that a group of people cared enough to sign up, pay, or build a habit around solving a specific problem. The shutdown doesn’t erase that proof — it just means whatever business was built on top of it didn’t survive. Those are two different facts, and conflating them is the most common mistake in opportunity-spotting.

Specificity beats speed

The instinct when browsing dead products is to skim for a name you recognize and assume the whole category is now open. That’s rarely the useful read. The better exercise is to ask what specific slice of the audience the original served, what they actually did inside the product day to day, and what part of that job still has no good home now. That answer is usually narrower — and more actionable — than "the whole space is available."

You don’t need permission to check

None of this requires market research budget. It requires reading a handful of dead listings closely instead of skimming a hundred of them shallowly, and being honest about whether you’d actually want to spend the next year on the gap you find.