6. The Plugin Gold Rush: How to Find Your Next Solopreneur Idea
Welcome back to the series on generating solopreneur ideas that you can build in just one day a week.
In the last post, we analyzed successful startups to find pain points. Today, let’s change tack and dive into a massive, often-overlooked opportunity: platform plugins.
These are the apps and extensions that add functionality to platforms like Shopify, Notion, WordPress, and more. People are scrambling to build them, knowing they tap into a ready-made audience of paying users.
There’s tens of thousands of these plugins. The question is: how do we find a gap? And what if the real business idea isn’t the plugin itself, but the tool that finds the gaps?
The Plugin Ecosystem is Massive
To understand the scale, just look at the major players and their app stores.
Organisers: Notion, Obsidian
Ecommerce: Shopify, BigCommerce , WooCommerce Wix
Project Management: monday.com, Asana, ClickUp, Smartsheet
Sheets/Databases: Airtable, Google Sheets
CMS: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal
CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce
Customer Support (CX): Zendesk, Intercom
Integration (iPaaS): Zapier, n8n, Tray.io
The “Gap Finder” Wishlist
If we had the perfect tool to navigate this gold rush, what would it do?
Competitor Analysis: Identify plugins that exist on one platform (like Shopify) but not on a competitor (like WooCommerce).
Revenue Sorting: Show us which plugins are making real money.
Trend Spotting: Identify upcoming categories to get ahead of the curve.
Pain Point Analysis: Scrape and analyze negative reviews to find what users really want.
(The Dream): Use AI to sketch out a new plugin that solves those specific pain points.
So, does this tool exist?
I looked around. SaasJet has a MarketPlace Reporter that tracks trends, which is one aspect. GapScout analyzes product feedback but doesn’t do competitor analysis or directory comparison.
That’s... basically it.
It seems there’s a massive gap... in the market for finding gaps. This could be due to a big hurdle, like the difficulty of scraping so many different stores, but that challenge is unlikely to be universal.
The Business Idea: A “Plugin Gap” Scanner
The simplest way to validate this idea is to build a tool that compares just two popular marketplaces. If we can define a simple version, we can pitch it to plugin developers and see if they’d pay.
Here’s the back-of-the-napkin plan:
Ideal Customer: The serial plugin creator or app development agency.
How to Find Them: Twitter (Indie Hackers, #buildinpublic), messaging them via their existing marketplace listings.
Problem: It’s manual, time-consuming, and guess-work-heavy to decide what plugin to build next.
Solution: A simple, categorised directory that shows which popular plugins are missing on which platforms.
Market Size: Tens of thousands of app development firms and solo creators.
Trends: AI makes it easier than ever to build a plugin. Competition is fierce, making a tool that provides a strategic edge more valuable.
Pricing: TBD. Start with a free beta to get feedback. A monthly subscription might not work—once a dev finds an idea, they might churn. A “credit” system (e.g., “pay per report”) could be a better model.
The Minimum Viable Plan
So, what’s the minimum implementation?
My main constraint for this side hustle is “ease of implementation.” I checked, and unfortunately, most plugin directories (Shopify, Notion, etc.) don’t have a public API for their marketplaces. This means we’d need to rely on web scraping, which can be error-prone.
However, some do. WordPress has a good API, and Zendesk has one.
But to make this valuable, we need to target the hottest markets. Let’s start with two huge competitors and try to catalog their marketplaces, even if it requires creative scraping:
Shopify: Insanely popular. A must-have.
WooCommerce: Built on WordPress (which does have a plugin API we might be able to leverage).
These two are big targets for developers, and the revenue from a single successful plugin can be massive.
In the next post, we’ll do the first step of any good business idea: go find real customers and see if this is a problem they’d actually pay to solve.
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