What is a gap? (3 ways to find opportunities other people miss)

Or at least how I do it.

Okay, I put off writing this post for far too long because I kept wanting to make it more complex than it needed to be.

A big part of my role in SEO and marketing was finding untapped opportunities, specifically in the content space. I love it. It’s like a treasure hunt with an Excel sheet.

Over time, as I built this muscle, I started to recognize patterns in the types of gaps I would find.

All that being said, I 100% expect that there are more than the 3 I’m going to provide you with today. I’ve been an avid reader of sites like gaps.com and I even purchased two resources (https://internetpipes.com/ and https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/) to help me unravel more of the best gap-finding techniques.

But the more I leaned into those resources, the more confused I felt. It felt like I was trying to cook with ingredients I didn’t know and hadn’t tasted – so I had no idea if the dish was going to be edible.

This is what I meant when I said I was making it more complex than it needed to be.

Instead, for this post, I’m only sharing what I know works – from experience – and what my gut tells me will be useful to the few people who read this.

The Three Gaps

A gap is created whenever one of the following three elements is true:

There’s been a shift in attention, resources, or incentives.
A strategy used by one group has never been applied to another.
An assumed pain has gone unsolved.

Obviously, these gaps can exist outside of the content space and if I were more entrepreneur than I am writer, I’d provide some killer examples to build. But for now, I’m going to lean into my content chops and explain these as simply as I can with examples I’ve seen in the wild.

The Shift Gap

The easiest way to spot a shift gap is to simply pay attention to where the crowd is going.

When TikTok launched, when Threads launched, when the masses exited Twitter – all of those were significant shifts in attention that created mountains of opportunity.

When shifts this large occur, you can pretty much do anything to catch the early waves. The first YouTubers built massive careers from content that wouldn’t break 1,000 views today.

What's interesting to me is that people go to new platforms in search of the same things. TikTok launched and people still wanted to see attractive people, food, beautiful locations… It was Instagram and YouTube just shrunk down. Threads touted itself as an ethical alternative to Twitter, but people still wanted drama and hot takes.

That mostly covers the shift in attention (think new platform, new big name, new hot topic). Ride the waves. But how do you spot a wave before it hits? You don’t. The trick is to catch it early. And the only way to catch it early is to constantly be surfing (i.e., creating). Putting content out there builds the muscle of recognizing what works – and this is the only shortcut to finding waves worth riding.

A shift in resources works much in the same way. When a platform changes their monetization rules or a company offers crazy deals, swag, giveaways — all of that can be used to build an audience or grab attention as it shifts.

You want to become the Stripe of content.

Stripe (and many of the highest-earning companies in the world) don’t make their money by selling something. They make their money by earning a small percentage of what other people sell. They interject themselves into the transaction.

You can do the same thing with attention.

How can you put yourself in the middle of the shift? How can you siphon off a portion of the moving crowd so that they now follow you, pay attention to your content, and rely on your voice?

Finally, incentives. Go back to Maslow’s Hierarchy if you’re ever running low on content ideas. People want to be safe, rich, hot, and liked. They want status, power, freedom. Whenever something comes along that offers them a new, easier way to get these things – that is a gap you can leverage.

Maslows-Hierarchy-of-Needs — Source: SaaS Academy

Ozempic for weight loss. New countries opening travel visas. A hurricane brewing that threatens millions (Ryan Hall is a master at this.). Just like before, you interject yourself into this shifting attention and create content that provides the incentive they are looking for: here is the right way to use Ozempic; here is how to build a new life in country x, y, z; here is how to stay safe during storm Wanda.

A big part of leveraging the shift gap is simply paying attention what people already want, and positioning your words, videos, podcasts, etc. as a new way to get those things.

The Strategy Gap

I don’t remember if I included this in my OnlyFans article, but one of the fastest growing and highest paid OF creators got to where they did by using paid ads.

Before OF, they had a Shopify store. They’d been learning e-commerce ads for years. Then, when OF was gaining traction, they jumped in and realized how difficult (and competitive) it was to grow purely from free content — content that was constantly being pulled down and getting accounts banned on every social network needed to grow.

So, they tried something different.

They got creative and made e-commerce inspired ads for the adult content, drove traffic to advertiser safe pages, which led people down a funnel into their paid OF business.

It’s fusion cooking but for the internet.

Going back 12 years, this is how I created one of the best college capstones my professor ever read (his words, not mine haha). I’d spent the better part of 4 years studying Ancient Greek and Roman religion, where “hero culture” was an embedded ideology in their texts. My capstone, however, was on Jewish literature and religion. I brought my lens of hero culture into these Jewish texts and was able to pull out narratives no one had ever seen before.

Was I a genius? (I’d love to think so!) But no. I simply came with different dots to connect, so the picture I was able to create looked different from everyone else’s.

What dots do you have that no one else does? Or that no one else does in this very particular realm of creation?

This is probably my favorite gap of all three because it's literally infinite. You find as many disparate pieces as possible and mash them together. Mashed potatoes + waffles – go for it. Steak flavored ice cream – give it a try. Oreo crusted salmon with a strawberry donut glaze – you might go to jail for that one, but yolo.

(food examples are always the best)

Here's a related resource that sparked the seed of this idea years ago.

Now, one caveat that I want to make sure I hit home is that the strategy you apply to a new space has to be one that is already currently working in its home stadium. The OF ads example worked because they knew e-comm ads inside and out. They weren’t starting from scratch. It was a proven tactic re-applied in a new, unproven arena.

I knew that hero worship and hero language were core elements of the ancient experience. It helped many cultures around the world navigate their day-to-day lives, so when I applied it to a new people group, it wasn’t the furthest stretch in the world to think it might work for them too.

What are you already good at? What wins have you already stacked under your belt? Now, how can you apply those to this very specific, new thing you want to do?

Nothing is wasted.

The Pain Gap

This is an extension of one of the overused bits of entrepreneurial advice – solve your own pain points.

I say it’s overused not because it isn’t true; it’s just that people have become a bit numb to what it actually means. As soon as you give an aspiring entrepreneur or creator this advice, they immediately start running around like a chicken with their head cut off, inventing problems that no one honestly gives two nuts about.

...Ok, that’s great you made it easier to wipe yogurt off of a spoon, but I’m not paying you $49/mo for this.

A better version of this advice is to find “assumed” pains. Assumed pains are things we just accept as normal because we’ve been exposed to them for so long, and so many times that it just seems irrational to complain about them – and, everyone else seems just to accept them too.

Coolers, especially those Styrofoam ones, kinda suck. But we bought them because they were cheap, and that’s what everyone brought to the game/party/beach – unless you had the nicer plastic ones, that also kinda sucked and got filthy. Yeti came and made them better. Wow, it actually keeps stuff cold and doesn’t look like I pulled it out of a ditch after a fun day out.

Short-form video recipes are a win. People don’t want to read about your grandpa’s second-grade coloring competition on their way to finding how much butter they need for their pie – but Google loves to show these articles to searchers. And YouTube incentivizes long videos for the almighty ad dollars.

Short-form came in and said hey, what if I show you how to cook shit in like 20 seconds? Yes, that would be great, thank you.

A great way to spot assumed pains is to look for hesitation.

Whenever I hesitate to do something, it’s usually because there’s resistance there – be it conscious or unconscious. There’s a reason I don’t want to do it. Maybe it takes too long, or it’s too uncomfortable, or so on. Lean into that.

Folding clothes is probably the worst part of doing laundry. Most people feel hesitation when it comes time to take the clothes out of the dryer because they know what comes next. Insert folding boards. They're not perfect, but maybe they make the process 30% faster. That’s 30% less hesitation I feel, and an assumed pain that’s at least 30% solved.

Listicles are a great content example.

I want to learn about X, but I don’t know where to start. Insert “The 10 best ways to start learning X.” The format offers me a simple, digestible amount of information with a clear end point (ten). After I consume the ten, I can then decide what comes next – but for now, the list made it easier for me to engage with the topic I wanted to learn more about.

It solved my hesitation. I soothed (at least temporarily) my assumed pain (learning is hard, time-consuming, etc.).

To close this one out, instead of asking – what pain do I feel or what pain can I solve – look around at your life and ask, “Why aren’t I doing X?” This is an easy question to give others too.

“Hey, why don’t you do X more often, or at all?”
“I saw you were keeping up with Y for a while; why’d you stop?”
“What are you not looking forward to doing this weekend?

In many ways, content is like the grease for the squeaky wheel. If people are willing to spend minutes (or hours) consuming content about an assumed pain they want to solve – that’s usually a great indicator of a potential product.

But it also doesn’t have to be.

Using Gaps

How you use these gaps is up to you.

For me, creating into a gap is enticing because I know, at least on some level, I’m helping people by creating things that should exist. In many cases, I’m helping myself, and that “audience of one” mentality can be a powerful motivator to get you through the slog of consistent creation.

But many gaps are not goldmines. This is where I have gone wrong in the past. Most things that don’t exist don’t exist for a reason. It’s because the demand isn’t there. Or the distribution. Or some other core part of the engine that’s needed to run.

The point of finding a gap isn’t only to create something people have never seen before. It’s to create something only you can; to find where you uniquely, unapologetically fit.

And then, from that position, to invite people into the opportunity you see – to show them how you can help them navigate the shift, apply the new strategy, or solve the assumed pain. You find the gap so that you can meet people there and help them along to where they’re going next (which is, ideally, an even deeper relationship with you and the stuff you create).