App Store Reverse Engineering Prompt Pack

Original ideas are expensive and slow. The people who make money build on demand the market has already proven, without competing head-on. The App Store is your market research tool: find an app that ranks first without paying for ads, and its bad reviews are the needs nobody has met yet.

📸 Step 1 — Gather the material

1. Pick a niche you care about and search it on the App Store.
2. Open the first app that is NOT sponsored. Ranking first without ad spend means real demand.
3. Screenshot three things:

• The app description: the whole page, including the feature list
• Positive reviews: around 10
• Negative reviews: at least 15–20 (these are the valuable ones)

🎯 Step 2 — The main prompt

Drop every screenshot into Claude, then paste:

Reverse engineer this app for me, and work out:

- Who is its ideal target customer?
- What is that customer's biggest pain point?
- What gap in the market does this app still fail to fill?
- If we added AI to make this app easier and more convenient to use, which AI features would we add?

I want to focus on serving one core ideal customer profile (ICP) and take market share from this app.

🔬 Step 3 — Interrogate it (do not skip this)

The first answer is usually too pretty. Follow up with:

For every gap and AI feature you proposed, evaluate it again:

1. Which reviews is this conclusion based on? Quote them.
2. If the pain point is really this big, why hasn't the original app addressed it?
   A technical limit, a conflict with its business model, or simple neglect?
3. Does this AI feature genuinely solve the pain point, or is it just "adding AI"?
4. What evidence is there that my chosen ICP would pay for this?

Wherever you are not sure, say "this needs to be validated with real users" instead of guessing.

✅ Step 4 — Ask real users

AI gives you a starting point, not the answer. Find 5 target users and ask these 5 questions:

1. What are you using to solve this right now?
2. The last time you used it, which part was the most annoying?
3. What alternatives have you tried? Why did you stop?
4. If something solved this for you, how much would you pay?
5. At what moment would you think of reaching for it?

By now you have a gap, and answers from 5 real users. The next step is validating it, building it cheaply, and actually selling it. Those three steps are where most people get stuck.