Treasure Maps
When the biggest niche is the people looking for a niche
In a gold rush, sell shovels.
Then why does it feel like the most popular thing right now is selling treasure maps?
If you spend any time in the corners of the internet where people are trying to build software businesses, you’ll have noticed. Reddit scrapers, idea generators, $10K MRR guides, directory builders, AI automation agency courses. Tools and content that promise to show you where to dig, and so many of them that you’ll run out of patience before you run out of posts.
This isn’t new, of course. People have been selling quick wins forever, from VHS courses on how to start a business to Tupperware parties to MLM structures where the product is basically recruiting the next seller. The format changes but the pattern stays the same: sell the path to success, not the thing at the end of it. What the AI era does is amplify all of it, because building is nearly free now, which means more people want to build, which means more demand for someone to tell them what to build, and since building is nearly free it’s also easy to build the thing that tells people what to build. The supply and demand sides feed each other endlessly.
The ouroboros
“Scratch your own itch” is good advice and it’s been good advice for decades, but when your biggest itch is figuring out what to build, scratching it means building idea-finding tools for other people in the same position. It’s like a writing group where everyone ends up writing about writing. The biggest niche visible from inside builder communities is builders, so “build for a niche” quietly becomes “build for builders,” and you get 150 lead generation tools and idea generators that generate ideas for more idea generators.
The Reddit scrapers are a perfect example. In theory, scraping communities for complaints is a reasonable way to surface real problems. In practice, most of these tools end up scraping subreddits full of other builders discussing their problems finding ideas, so you’re mostly scraping other builders discussing their own search for ideas. The expensive structural problems that actual businesses would pay to solve don’t get posted on Reddit at all, because the people who have them are too busy working to write about them. You’re mining a mine full of other miners.
I feel the pull too
I’m not above this. When I see a slick Reddit scraper demo, I often click the link, because the desire for someone to just hand you the answer is real. Figuring out what to build, who needs it, whether they’ll pay for it is genuinely hard, and of course we want a shortcut.
The first thing I built was an analytics platform that sent you a weekly AI summary of your traffic so you didn’t have to log in and stare at dashboards. A real product, and a useful one. But if I’m honest it was solving a founder’s meta-problem, understanding who visits my site, rather than solving a problem I’d encountered out in the world. I was building for myself-as-founder, which felt like scratching my own itch but was really just drawing another map.
Where ideas actually come from
The real version of idea discovery is boring. You work somewhere, something is broken, nobody fixes it because it’s not the core business, you leave, and you remember it. That’s roughly how most real products start, not from a scraper or an AI-generated list of “high-demand niches” but from lived experience with a problem that bothered you enough to stick around in your head.
My current side project is an asset management tool for small businesses, and it comes from years at a company where we genuinely had no idea what we owned. It’s mundane and it might not work as a business, but the problem is real and I understand it because I lived in it. That’s the bit the treasure maps skip: they can point you toward a category, but they can’t give you the understanding of the problem that you need to actually solve it.
Maps all the way down
Some of these products are genuinely good and some of the content is genuinely helpful, so this isn’t about individual people doing something wrong. It’s about an ecosystem that makes map-drawing the default. When the audience is right there, when they’re eager and encouraging and telling you “just ship it,” drawing another map is the path of least resistance. The market for treasure maps is obvious and accessible, and the market for actual treasure requires you to leave the room and go dig somewhere nobody’s looking.
The next time you find yourself browsing a subreddit full of people sharing their latest niche-finding tool, or watching a video about how to build a directory site in a day, pay attention to what you’re actually feeling. If it’s excitement about the problem the tool solves, great. But if it’s relief that someone might finally tell you what to build, that’s the map talking. And the map doesn’t know where the treasure is either.