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Finding app ideas from search demand — the Tentacle Strategy

Steve P. Young's step-by-step method to pick an app idea by finding an under-served keyword "tentacle" of a big, high-earning app (e.g. brown noise from Endel/Calm), validated before building.

Updated 2026-10-23·1 source·product-strategyapp-ideasvalidationasokeyword-research

Finding app ideas from search demand — the Tentacle Strategy

TL;DR

  • Don’t ask “what app should I build?” — ask “which tentacle can I pull from a successful app?”1
  • Big apps (the “octopus”, e.g. Calm) grow by adding side products — sleep stories, soundscapes, focus music, green noise — but can’t rank for all of them; Calm doesn’t even rank #1 for “meditation”.23
  • An indie builds a focused app for one such tentacle and ranks #1 for its keywords.3
  • Validate before writing code: high-RPI category → big app with ≥3:1 revenue:downloads → 6–10 keywords at score ~30 with low difficulty → manual SERP check.45
  • App Masters’ results with it: one app $550K last year, another $2–3K/month fully organic, a client profitable from day one reaching $12–15K/month organically.67

Details

Procedure (August 2026):

  1. Pick a high-RPI category — health & fitness, education, business (Choosing an app category by revenue per install (RPI)).8
  2. Find the octopus in AppMagic (appmagic.rocks, free): filter category, iPhone/iPad only (iOS users pay more than Android), top grossing; scroll past the obvious names.9
  3. Check its economics. Endel: ~$500K/month on ~100K downloads in AppMagic; Sensor Tower says ~$600K. Look for ≥3:1 revenue per download (Steve prefers ≥$300K/month and ~100K downloads — bigger apps have more tentacles).104
  4. List its indexed keywords in ASOMobile → App Keywords, sorted by search-ads score (Mining competitors' keywords and listing history (ASOMobile workflow)).5
  5. Shortlist 6–10 relevant keywords at score ~30 (25–28 OK, ≤20 weak) with complexity < 3; you need only 2–3 to win. Example: “brown noise” and “brown noise free”, both 35 (green noise/green noise free would also work).51112
  6. Check the live App Store results for ratings counts and keyword-in-title; skip terms where a 200K-rating app has the keyword in its title (Checking keyword difficulty by reading the actual search results).1314
  7. If you believe you can reach #1, build the simplest version (Scoping the first version — solve one problem), then follow What to work on at each stage — from launch to paid ads.12

Why search is the right validator. ASO traffic is free and high-converting because the user is already searching for the tentacle; ranking top 3 drives sales.3

Competitive backdrop. RevenueCat’s subscription report (cited by Steve) shows a surge of new, mostly iOS, apps since early 2026; apps launched before 2020 earn ~69% of subscription revenue, apps launched 2025+ only ~3%. Ideas “from your dome” will probably fail.115

Disagreements / caveats

  • Steve coined the name and his examples are his own/clients’ apps (survivorship bias); one $2–3K/month app was not in a high-RPI category and still worked.7
  • Third-party revenue estimates differ (AppMagic vs Sensor Tower) — cross-check.10

See also

Footnotes

  1. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 00:00 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2

  2. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 03:10 — Steve P. Young ↩

  3. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 04:24 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 14:08 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2

  5. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 07:33 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 11:29 — Steve P. Young ↩

  7. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 12:47 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2

  8. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 02:22 — Steve P. Young ↩

  9. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 05:35 — Steve P. Young ↩

  10. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 06:22 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2

  11. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 08:59 — Steve P. Young ↩

  12. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 14:59 — Steve P. Young ↩ ↩2

  13. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 09:49 — Steve P. Young ↩

  14. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 11:29 — Steve P. Young ↩

  15. App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy) @ 01:12 — Steve P. Young ↩