We Built a Tool That Finds Underserved Markets. Here's What It Found First.

Most market-research tools for small businesses are built for franchise teams with a research budget: Placer.ai, Esri Business Analyst, that tier. spotagap is built for the person opening their first location, and it works by comparing real business density against real population, city by city, category by category, and saying plainly when a place is underserved.

The method, in one paragraph

For every hex-shaped area covering a metro, we count how many businesses of a category (grocery, pharmacy, salon, sushi restaurant, 180 categories and counting) sit within that area's catchment, then divide by the catchment's population to get a rate per 10,000 people. That rate gets compared against the metro's own average for that same category, never a national number, never a fixed threshold. Below half the average is underserved. Above one and a half times it is saturated. Everything else is adequately served. The population figure blends in half-weighted daytime workplace population too, so a neighborhood near a university or hospital isn't scored as if it empties out at night.

That's the whole method. No modeled prediction, no black box, the same formulas are on our How It Works page in full.

What it's found so far

The dataset is genuinely early. As of this writing, the engine has scored 15 metros, ranging from Austin, Texas down to small towns like Monroe, Connecticut and Accord, New York. That's the honest state of it, not a nationwide index yet, and we say so everywhere in the app rather than implying broader coverage than we actually have.

Even at this scale, real patterns show up. Monroe, Connecticut scores at 47% of its own grocery benchmark in one catchment, a real, measurable gap in a town most retail-analytics tools never look at twice. Coffee shop coverage across the handful of towns scored so far is underserved almost everywhere we've checked, which tracks: cafes cluster in dense commercial cores, and most of what's been scored so far isn't one.

Why this compounds

Every city someone explores in the app gets scored and cached, which means the next person to ask about that city gets an instant answer, and our own cross-metro reports (like this one) get richer data to draw from. That's the whole idea behind the "I have a business" mode: pick a category, and see the best place to open it across every metro scored so far, ranked by how underserved it actually is, not a guess.