Introducing the Market Demand Scorer — v0.1.54

One of the hardest questions when evaluating a SaaS opportunity is whether anyone actually wants the thing. A product might look technically simple to replicate and have attractive pricing, but if its review footprint is thin and customers are lukewarm, the signal is weak.

v0.1.54 introduces the Market Demand Scorer — a dedicated sub-module that turns scraped review data into a structured, evidence-based demand score for every product the system analyses.

What it does

The scorer looks at four dimensions of review evidence:

• How many reviews exist — processed on a logarithmic scale so that 10 reviews still register as real signal
• How recent those reviews are — newer activity is weighted higher, reflecting current momentum
• What the average star rating is — a direct quality proxy from customers themselves
• What the sentiment ratio looks like — the balance of positive versus negative review language

These four inputs produce a score from 1 to 10, plus a written explanation that describes in plain English why the product received that score. Both are stored in the product dossier.

Why logarithmic volume scaling matters

A naive implementation would give a product with 10 reviews a near-zero score and a product with 1,000 reviews a perfect one. That's too blunt. Many genuinely interesting niche proptech tools have modest review counts — not because no one uses them, but because the category is specialist. The logarithmic scale ensures these products aren't written off before the other signals are considered.

Where you'll see it

The market demand score is now a visible, sortable column on the main dashboard. It also appears in the Market Demand section of any product's full dossier, where the written explanation gives you the reasoning behind the number — useful for sharing context with the wider team or copy-pasting into a build brief.

It feeds directly into the composite opportunity score used to rank all products, alongside replicability, revenue potential, and competitive gap.

What's next

With market demand scoring in place, the four core scoring dimensions are taking shape. Future releases will continue to refine weighting, introduce cross-product benchmarking, and expand the written explanation into a fuller analyst-style narrative.