How I find and validate indie app ideas with ASO
Most developers start with code. After shipping 30+ iOS apps, I start somewhere else: the App Store search box. An app's fate is mostly decided before the first line of Swift — by whether real people search for what you're about to build, and whether you can actually rank for it.
Here's the ASO-first process I use to find and validate ideas, with real numbers from my own apps.
1. Capture ideas everywhere
The best ideas rarely arrive at the desk. They come from a friend's offhand complaint, something my kid asks for, or a tool I personally wish existed. I write every one down immediately and validate them later, in batches. An idea you didn't capture is an idea you lost.
2. Validate the one thing that matters first — free traffic
Before design, before features, I answer a single question: can this app earn free, organic installs from search? For an indie app, organic discovery is what makes the unit economics work.
To answer it, I look at two App Store metrics for the relevant keywords (I pull Apple Search Ads data with an ASO tool — I use Astro):
- Popularity — how often people search the term.
- Difficulty — how hard it is to outrank everyone already there.
The whole game is finding keywords with enough popularity and low enough difficulty that a brand-new app can realistically crack the top 10.
3. Why head terms are a trap — a real example
Aira, my breathing app, is about as relevant to the word "breathing" as an app can be. Yet it doesn't rank for it at all: "breathing" carries a difficulty of 67, and the top spots are locked up by apps with years of installs and reviews. Chasing it would be months of work for nothing.
Meanwhile, "wim hof method" (difficulty 32) and "vagus" (difficulty 23) are winnable — same niche, a fraction of the competition. That's where a new app should plant its flag.
The pattern repeats in fitness. For my workout app BCAA, "ai fitness trainer" is tempting but sits at difficulty 71. A close neighbor, "ai muscle filter," has higher popularity at roughly half the difficulty (39) — same audience, a realistic shot at page one.
4. My rules of thumb
Across many launches, these App Store numbers (US) have held up for me:
- Difficulty around 25 is realistically rankable into the top 10 for a fresh app.
- Popularity around 33 signals a meaningful — not huge — stream of downloads, often in the ballpark of ~$500/month once it's monetized. Stack a few of those and it adds up.
- Avoid the worst quadrant: high difficulty and low popularity (say, difficulty 62 at popularity 6). Easy to find, never worth your time.
5. Match the business model to the keyword
The keyword research also tells me how to monetize, before I build:
- Transformational content → subscriptions. A shadow-work journal justifies a weekly or yearly plan because it delivers ongoing value.
- One-off jobs → short weekly subscriptions. A photo colorizer ("black and white to color") is often needed once — a short weekly plan fits that intent.
- Data history → retention. Timers and trackers (a CrossFit WOD timer, or my own Jet Lag and BCAA) get stickier the longer you use them: your history is the lock-in, which makes a subscription fair.
6. The ranking shortcut most people skip
Even when difficulty looks high, you can often still break in by putting the exact phrase in your app's name and subtitle. Apple weights those fields heavily — for a tight niche like debt snowball, precise metadata alone can land you in the top four.
The takeaway
Validation is the balance between what you find interesting and what the ASO numbers say. Don't burn weeks on an idea with near-zero popularity, however easy it is to build. Find the niches with real demand, a clear path to monetization, and a difficulty you can actually beat — then write the code.
And once the numbers check out and you start building, the next thing to protect is your App Store account itself — more on that in how to survive the App Store in 2026. If you'd like a senior owner to take an idea from validation to a shipped, growing app, that's how I work.
Want a second pair of eyes on an idea, or an ASO audit of an app you've already shipped? Get in touch.