ProductBuild the feature the platform forgot
WordPress product builder at Cozmoslabs
Profile Builder earned money from its first day because WordPress handled login and registration forms badly. Nobody had to be convinced the problem existed: site owners hit it the moment they needed a member area. Look for the job your host platform leaves half done. A gap every user runs into is demand you do not have to create.
Related advice
CristianEnter a new platform without hiring a new team
Cristian built TranslatePress for Shopify himself over six months of on-and-off work with AI coding tools, instead of hiring React developers or outsourcing the app. A decade-old product with 400,000 WordPress installs already knew the problem; what it lacked was a way into a second platform without a second team. AI tools make a founder who knows the domain enough to ship the first version. Use them to test the new market, and hire only once the new platform proves it pays.
CristianStore the work in the platform, not behind a proxy
TranslatePress for Shopify writes every translation into Shopify's native multilingual API instead of serving pages through an outside proxy. The merchant keeps the translations if the app is removed, the store loads as fast as before, and the front end stays theirs. That removes the two fears that stop a merchant from installing: lock-in and a slower store. If your app can save its output in the host platform's own storage, do it, and say so on the listing.
CristianBuild products from real client problems, not speculation
Every Cozmoslabs product started with a problem their clients kept running into. They do not build on speculation or trends. When you know a product will take a year to execute, you need to be certain the problem is real. Spot the pattern in client requests, validate that the pain is genuine, and only then commit to building. Being picky about what you build is a feature, not a limitation.
CristianA one-product-per-year cadence forces you to say no to almost everything
Every Cozmoslabs plugin takes about a year to ship properly, which means Cristian gets very few product decisions in a working lifetime. He treats that scarcity as the real filter: the question is never whether an idea is good, because plenty of good ideas appear, it is whether this one is worth giving up a whole year of everything else. That opportunity cost makes saying no the default and saying yes a rare, deliberate act. When each commitment costs a year, the discipline is not picking winners, it is refusing the merely-good in favor of the truly worth it.