App Review Opportunity Research Template

A practical, evidence-led template for founders who want to turn public App Store and Google Play reviews into customer-interview prompts and product hypotheses.

This is not a feature-request list. The goal is to find repeated workflow failures, understand who experiences them, and decide what deserves an interview before building.

Use it in 45 minutes

1. Pick one competitor around a single job your prospective customer already does.
2. Collect 20 to 50 recent low-rating reviews from the App Store or Google Play.
3. Paste the useful review excerpts into research-template.md.
4. Group reviews only when they describe the same job, failure, and consequence.
5. Write one interview question for each repeated cluster. Do not treat a review as proof of demand.

What makes a signal worth testing

Prioritize a cluster when it has all three:

• Repetition: multiple people independently describe the same failure.
• Specificity: the review names a task, context, or workaround, not just a star rating.
• Cost: the failure wastes time, loses work, creates risk, or blocks revenue.

Discard vague complaints, one-off bugs, and requests with no job or consequence. A repeated complaint is a lead for customer conversations, not a market-size claim.

Suggested workflow

Start with one product. After you find a credible cluster, repeat the same exercise on two to four close alternatives. A pattern that appears across competitors is more useful than a long list of issues from one app.

For larger samples, Review2Idea groups public reviews into evidence-backed pain-point clusters and produces a research starting point. Keep the source reviews and validate the hypothesis with real users.

If you are already looking at a competitor listing, the optional Chrome extension sends the active App Store or Google Play URL into that workflow without copying it manually.

Use with AI agents

Install the evidence-research workflow in a skills-compatible agent:

npx skills add hijabcantic-dotcom/app-review-opportunity-research-template --skill app-review-evidence-research

Files

• research-template.md: Copy this file for every competitor or category.
• aso-review-evidence-appendix.md: A client-ready evidence appendix for ASO and app-growth audits.
• app-review-evidence-research: Installable AI workflow for producing an evidence brief.
• Chinese guide
• Japanese guide

License

CC0-1.0