DistroFit · Resources

The tools I'd actually use.

Most pages like this are affiliate links with a paragraph of filler attached. This one has no affiliate links and nothing on it pays me anything.

It is organised around six questions rather than tool categories, because you rarely need "a market research tool", you need to know whether anyone actually has the problem. Where the honest answer is that no tool helps and you should just do the work, it says that instead of padding the list.

Five sections end with a note saying buy nothing. Those are the useful parts.

01 of 06

Is this problem real?

The best evidence is people complaining about it in public, unprompted, before you turned up.

Reddit: is still the best place for that and nothing has replaced it. Search the subreddit your users actually live in, sort by top, and read the threads where people are annoyed. Slow, unglamorous, and better than any tool that promises to do it for you.
G2and Capterra: are the underrated ones. Go to a competitor's page and read only the one and two star reviews. These are complaints from people who already paid money, which makes them worth more than anything on a forum. Both are lead generation businesses, so the ordering is influenced by who pays them, but the review text is real.
Hacker News: searched through Algolia. Ask HN threads get unusually specific about developer and founder pain. The audience skews technical and contrarian, so do not mistake it for how normal buyers think.
Google Trends: tells you if interest is rising or you are chasing something dead. It gives relative interest, never absolute numbers, so it answers direction and nothing else.
Exploding Topics: surfaces things earlier than Trends does. It has a free tier. It is part of Semrush now and the lists are widely read, so the early advantage is smaller than the marketing suggests.

Buy nothing here

There is a whole category of tools that promise to find you a startup idea from Reddit complaints. GummySearch was the best known and it closed in November 2025. Most of what replaced it is a wrapper around the public Reddit API with a language model on top, and none of them have data you cannot get yourself. Search Reddit and read bad reviews.

02 of 06

Does it already exist?

It almost always does. The useful question is whether the existing ones are any good and whether anyone is making money.

G2and Capterra: again. A category page gives you the whole competitive set in about ten minutes. Coverage is strong for B2B software and weak for consumer, hardware and anything niche.
Product Hunt: shows you the last few years of attempts, including the ones that died. A listing tells you nothing about whether the product survived, which is exactly why it is worth reading.
Similarweb: gives you a free per-site view without logging in: rank, traffic direction, bounce rate, and the split between direct, search and referral traffic. That split is the fastest read on which channel actually works in a category. The numbers are estimates and they get unreliable on small sites, so treat them as shape rather than fact.
BuiltWith: tells you what a competitor runs. Payments, analytics, CMS. Useful for judging how serious they are and roughly what they spend. It works by fingerprinting, so it misses anything server side or self hosted.
Ahrefs free tools: will tell you whether a competitor has real search presence. Ahrefs says the free backlink checker shows the top 20 backlinks, which is enough to know if there is anything there.
Crunchbase: for whether someone raised money to attack the same thing. Its coverage of bootstrapped competitors is poor, and those are usually the ones you are actually up against.

03 of 06

Is it big enough?

This is where most people invent a number and move on.

US Census SUSB: is the honest way to size a B2B market. Free, downloadable, and it gives you counts of real firms by industry and employee band, down to county level. Counting the actual companies that could buy from you beats any multiplication you can do on a slide. US only, and it lags by a year or two.
Google Keyword Planner: is the best free source of absolute search volume, and the suggested bids tell you what commercial intent looks like in your space. You need a Google Ads account to reach it, and volumes come in wide ranges until you are actually spending.
Ahrefs Keyword Generator: is the no signup sanity check. Ten seed terms, volume estimates, done in a minute.
Similarweb: again, pointed at the category leader. Modest traffic for the biggest player in your space means your share of it is smaller still.
Statista: has a free basic tier. Their Starter plan is listed at $199 a month billed annually, which puts it out of reach for most people reading this. Worth knowing that plenty of its headline figures are re-published vendor estimates, so check the source line before you quote anything from it.

Buy nothing here

TAM, SAM and SOM calculators. There are dozens and they all do the same thing, which is turn assumptions you made up into a number that looks researched. A size that does not come from counting real firms, real search volume or real competitor traffic is a guess with a chart on it.

04 of 06

What can I charge?

The thinnest section, because most of this is manual and there is no way around that.

Competitor pricing pages: Open five of them. This is the single most useful hour in the whole list and it needs no tool.
Baremetrics Open Startups: is a public board of small companies publishing real monthly revenue. Actual numbers from businesses at a comparable size, which is rarer than it should be. Small self-selected sample, skewed towards founders who benefit from being seen.
Tally: for running a willingness to pay survey against your own list. Unlimited forms and submissions free under fair use, with conditional logic and calculations not paywalled, which is unusually generous. Remember that what people say they would pay is always higher than what they pay.
ProfitWell Metrics: is free and does MRR, churn, LTV and cohorts once you have customers on a supported payment processor. Useless before launch, genuinely good after.
Paddle's pricing guide: is vendor content, so it steers you towards Paddle, but it is grounded in real subscription data rather than blog theory.

Buy nothing here

AI pricing optimisation and dynamic pricing tools. At small scale you do not have enough traffic to run a price test that means anything, so you would be paying for precision you cannot reach. Read competitor pages, pick a number, change it later.

05 of 06

How will anyone find out?

Google Search Console: is not optional. It is the only place your real query, impression and click data exists, and no third party estimate substitutes for it. Roughly sixteen months of history, and it hides low volume queries.
SparkToro: answers where your audience already spends attention: which sites, podcasts and accounts they follow, and what they search. The free plan is three previews a month, which is a teaser. Paid starts at $150 a month for the Business tier, so it is a one month subscription for a research sprint rather than something you keep.
Similarweb: for a competitor's traffic source split. Where the leader in your category gets most of its traffic tells you more than any advice post will.
Indie Hackers: for channel post-mortems from people at your scale. Heavy survivorship bias in the featured stories, so read the failures more carefully than the wins.
BuzzSumo: finds high performing content and the people who write it. It starts at $199 a month, which is not a solo builder price. Use the free trial for one focused week and cancel.

And this site

The channel report reads your site and tells you which of the 19 channels are open, and customers needed does the arithmetic that closes most of them. It will not tell you what to write or who to email, and it does not estimate traffic. Where your audience already spends attention is a question SparkToro answers and DistroFit does not.

Buy nothing here

All in one growth suites and social schedulers. Scheduling is a solved commodity with dozens of identical products, and none of them solve distribution. They solve posting, which is a different problem you do not have yet.

06 of 06

Does the site actually work?

Google Search Console: again. URL Inspection is the only authoritative answer to whether Google has actually indexed a page.
PageSpeed Insights: for performance, combining lab results with real Chrome user data where there is enough traffic to have any. A single score is noise. Read the diagnostics underneath it.
Lighthouse: is the same engine, but scriptable and able to run against localhost and pages behind a login. Free and open source. Scores depend on your machine, so do not compare a local run to a PageSpeed run.
Screaming Frog: crawls up to 500 URLs free, which covers most solo projects, and finds the broken links and duplicate titles you will never spot by hand. The licence is £199 a year. The free version cannot render JavaScript, which is a problem for a single page app.
Rich Results Testand Schema Markup Validator: answer different questions, so use both. The first shows what Google will actually do with your structured data. The second checks the same markup against the spec rather than Google's subset, and catches things the first one ignores.
Bing Webmaster Tools: is worth ten minutes. Bing's index increasingly feeds AI answer surfaces, and its diagnostics occasionally catch something Search Console does not mention.

Buy nothing here

Free "SEO score" widgets that give your site a number out of 100 and then email you. They are lead capture forms wearing a diagnostic costume. Lighthouse and Screaming Frog tell you the actual failing checks for nothing and without wanting your address.

This site runs a free diagnostic too

I should be straight about this one, since this site runs a free diagnostic and could easily be mistaken for the same thing. The difference is that every line of a DistroFit report cites the signal that produced it, so you can check the working and argue with it. A tool that gives you a score and no evidence is selling your email address to someone.

A note on prices

Every price above was taken from the tool's own site when this page was written. They change constantly, and free tiers get quietly reduced. Treat them as a starting point and check before you commit to anything.

Anything here that has gone stale or gone dead, tell me and I will fix it.