I turned Claude into an app-idea scout. Here's what it found on Réunion Island.

Friday evening, beer in hand, I’m wondering what to ship after VoiceJournal AI.

I open Claude. I type one command: /product-scout AI mobile apps for Réunion Island.

Fifteen minutes later I have 10 app ideas scored out of 100, with sourced pain points, competitors listed, pricing figures and a 3-month marketing plan. Plus 3 recommendations tailored to my stack and my profile.

Not a vague brainstorm. Not an unreadable McKinsey deck. Something I could act on the next morning.

Here’s how I did it, what it found, and the full skill you can copy.

The real problem when you’re hunting your next idea

Every indie hacker knows the moment: the current project settles into cruise mode, and the question comes back — “what do I build next?”

The usual options:

• ChatGPT “give me 10 SaaS ideas” → you get 10 generic B2B dashboards nobody will pay for
• Reddit / Indie Hackers → four hours scrolling US-centric posts, and you come out feeling like you’ve seen everything except anything actionable
• Twitter / TikTok build-in-public → inspiration, never a framed niche

What’s missing is a dedicated product consultant who:

1. Does the field research for you
2. Produces ideas fitted to your profile and your geography
3. Scores each one honestly (not a cheerleader)
4. Hands you a plan you can execute

I’d have paid €500 for that. So I built it with Claude instead.

The solution: Claude Skills

Anthropic recently shipped Claude Skills — a system where you turn Claude into a specialised tool with a SKILL.md file dropped into ~/.claude/skills/<name>/.

In practice, a skill is:

• A structured system prompt defining the role, the tone, the process, the output format
• Persistent: you don’t re-paste it every conversation, you invoke it with /skill-name
• Composable: Claude triggers it automatically when your request matches, or you force it

It’s the difference between asking a consultant “give me some ideas” (vague) and handing them a structured brief they’ve already internalised (precise).

My skill: product-scout

I built a skill called product-scout. Its mission:

Generate 10 digital product ideas worth shipping in a given niche, with real web research, scoring out of 100, and a full plan: user need, MVP, competitors, dev time, monetisation, acquisition, marketing budget.

The tone: blunt indie hacker, not a consultant in a suit. Rob Walling × Pieter Levels × Marc Lou. It calls things what they are: “this stinks”, “shippable this weekend”, “the gap is huge”.

Invocation is simple:

/product-scout [niche or theme]
/product-scout [niche] type: [saas|mobile|extension|ai|all]
/product-scout [niche] audience: [b2b|b2c|creators|personal]

Examples:

• /product-scout legal freelancers
• /product-scout parents of babies type: mobile
• /product-scout developer productivity type: extension

The live test: my own niche

I’m from Réunion Island. Réunion is 870,000 people, a strong identity, a high cost of living, and a geographic niche underserved on mobile AI. So I asked myself: if I had to ship an app for my island, what would it be?

I typed: /product-scout AI mobile apps for Réunion Island.

Claude ran 8 web searches (Reddit r/LaReunion, Product Hunt, Creole lexicons, national statistics on cost of living, trail conditions, local press), aggregated the pain points, and produced the report below.

The TL;DR it generated

The island is a geographic niche of ~870K people, fiercely attached to its identity (Creole, food, péi culture), and struggling with concrete problems: cost of living (+37% on food versus mainland France), regular cyclones, treacherous mountain weather for hikers, a non-standardised Creole. The local mobile market is underserved on AI — most “974” apps are news or institutional portals with 2015-era UI. A huge gap: no native AI mobile app combines “local intelligence” with an everyday use case.

The ranking of the 10 ideas

A closer look at idea #1: Kosa Lé (87/100 🔥)

Tagline: “Learn, translate and speak Réunion Creole like a local.”

The pain it identified:

“I was born on Réunion but my parents only spoke French to me — when my grandmother speaks Creole, I understand about 60%. When I have to answer, I’m lost. Google Translate doesn’t know Creole.”

The context it surfaced:

• Who: Réunionnais aged 18-45 who partially understand Creole, 2nd/3rd generation diaspora, ~80K mainlanders living on the island
• When: family conversations (grandparents), local social media, coming back from a trip home
• How many: ~870K residents + ~250K French-speaking diaspora — estimated paying target: 30-50K
• Why it isn’t solved: Réunion Creole has been an official regional language since 2014, but it’s too small for Duolingo and too big for Google Translate. Indie sweet spot.

The MVP it proposes:

1. Conversational FR ↔ Creole translation on a dataset built from public lexicons and the regional language office
2. A “Konversasyon” mode: you speak French, the AI answers in Creole with local TTS audio
3. “5 min/day” themed lessons (cooking, family, market, kabar)

Competitors identified: Google Translate (no Creole support), web lexicons (static, ugly), Assimil (book + CD, old-school format), the regional language office (institutional, no app — partnership possible).

Pricing: Free 10 translations/day, Marmay plan €4.99/mo, Family plan €7.99/mo. 12-month target: 3-5K subscribers = €15-25K MRR.

Three-channel acquisition plan: daily local TikTok, diaspora Facebook groups, partnership with the language office plus local press.

That’s the level of detail that changes things. Not “this could be interesting” — but “here’s how you ship it”.

The three things it taught me

1. Honest scoring forces rigour

If I asked ChatGPT for “10 ideas about Réunion”, I’d get 10 ideas with emojis and “this has real potential!”. My skill drops Bazar Créole to 48/100 and says, verbatim, “niche is professional but small, thin margins, tech adoption hard with this audience”.

That honesty is wired into the skill through:

• An explicit scoring grid (market size, pain intensity, solo feasibility, monetisation, competition, acquisition)
• One non-negotiable rule: “If an idea stinks, say so. If the niche is saturated, say so and propose a pivot.”

That’s the difference between a flattering brainstorm and a product audit.

2. A forced mix breaks the “SaaS only” bias

Left to itself, the model always returns web SaaS. It’s in the training data.

So I wired this into the skill:

At least 2 mobile ideas, 2 web SaaS ideas, 1 extension/plugin/AI idea. The rest: free.

The result: on the Réunion run I got 10 mobile apps (because I’d filtered explicitly), but in “all” mode the spread was far more useful. A creative constraint beats a vague brief.

3. It’s a starting point, not an oracle

The report lands in 15 minutes with sourced quotes and real numbers — but it’s an initial map, not scripture.

Before writing a line of Kosa Lé, I’d need to:

• Cross-check the quotes (talk to 10 Réunionnais who struggle with Creole)
• Validate a waitlist (simple landing page, target 200 emails in 7 days)
• Test the pricing (DM 20 target users: “what would you pay?”)

The unexpected bonus

I wanted 10 app ideas. I got 10 app ideas plus a free audit of my local market.

I now know:

• The exact size of the addressable Réunionnais diaspora (~250K)
• How many builders are already on the local AI angle (roughly zero)
• Estimated acquisition costs for my audience (TikTok CPC €0.15-0.30 on the French-speaking diaspora)
• Which institutional partnerships are available

The skill, copyable

The full skill is open source on GitHub: github.com/newBie974/skills.

You can drop it straight into your Claude skills folder:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/product-scout
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/product-scout/SKILL.md \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/newBie974/skills/main/product-scout/SKILL.md

Then, in Claude Code or Desktop:

/product-scout [your niche]

Run it on your own niche

The skill is free. Tweak it to your style — the tone, the scoring grid, the product types forced into the mix.

If you try it, DM me your top 3 — I’ll tell you honestly which one I’d ship in your place.

And if you want to see what I build, the app I’m working on right now is VoiceJournal AI — voice journaling with AI. Same stack (React Native + Expo + Claude + Supabase + RevenueCat) as what the scout recommends for 80% of the ideas it produced.

What’s next? I’ll probably pick from the Réunion report. Not Kosa Lé straight away — I need to validate it first — but the scout clearly opened up the map for the next 18 months.

Happy scouting. 🌶️