I began today with a goal of running some Google Ads, but took a detour to what many product makers would consider a gold mine: finding a competitor’s product that is seemingly in demand but abandoned.
I was looking for keywords that might be good to run ads under, trying some such as “woocommerce admin theme” and came across exactly that, a plugin which is a WooCommerce admin theme. Their website tagline is similar to the vision I have for Dashify.
A real WooCommerce admin theme. Finally.
Energy+ gives you an e-commerce focused panel by simplifying and improving Wordpress Admin and WooCommerce.
Upon further looking into it, however, it appeared to be abandoned. Despite having good traction, with 1,641 sales, 59 reviews, and 443 comments (it’s listed in a marketplace for WordPress plugins) it stopped receiving updates a couple years ago, and the author stopped responding to comments about a year ago, after the price was randomly raised from $30 to $699. After that, it’s nothing but bad reviews and comments asking what happened. A wonderful opportunity.
I reached out to those who I could that left negative comments and reviews, and wrote a blog post on Dashify’s website talking about Dashify as an alternative to this competitor, with the idea being that the blog post will come up in search results wether people are explicitly searching for alternatives or just coming across the plugin by that name for the first time.
It’s hard knowing that so many people are asking for exactly what I’m building, but struggling to find an effective way to reach them online (many of those profiles that make comments are created for the sole purpose of leaving the comment and have no contact info, and the usernames are often not used elsewhere online).