Genuinely underserved wedge (no linter/debugger exists, .shortcut is just a signed plist) with a found 480K-member audience, but it's capped as a $29 one-time prosumer util on a hobby budget, so the economics are side-income not a business. The risk is Apple shipping its own error detail in a Shortcuts update and erasing the failure-explainer overnight. Apple's continued deprecation of actions with every OS update means maintaining the linter's ruleset will be an endless treadmill for a tiny, one-time-paying power user niche.
Shortcuts Doctor
PIVOT · 63/100. Real demand, but the shape needs to change.
Genuinely underserved wedge (no linter/debugger exists, .shortcut is just a signed plist) with a found 480K-member audience, but it's capped as a $29 one-time prosumer util on a hobby budget, so the economics are side-income not a business. The risk is Apple shipping its own error detail in a Shortcuts update and erasing the failure-explainer overnight. Apple's continued deprecation of actions with every OS update means maintaining the linter's ruleset will be an endless treadmill for a tiny, one-time-paying power user niche.
Pre-sell 200 copies at $29 to a community off a linter demo on a single broken shortcut before building the failure-explainer; if power users pay upfront for the static lint alone, the one-time price clears as a viable util. You pre-sell 50 copies at $29 to the Automators.fm community using just mockups of the failure explainer interface.
Apple Shortcuts is the worst-rated app Apple ships: 4.2★ across 8,531 ratings while Apple's other first-party apps sit at 4.7-4.9★ in the same store. The reason is consistent in every review and a community thread: automations break silently and the error messages are useless. You wire up a 14-step shortcut, it works once, then a deprecated action or a nil value passed between steps kills it with a generic 'There was a problem running the shortcut' and zero indication of which step failed or why. Power users burn hours bisecting shortcuts by hand, deleting actions one at a time to find the…
PIVOT at 63/100 on Skeptral. The kill-shot: “Genuinely underserved wedge (no linter/debugger exists, .shortcut is just a signed plist) with a found 480K-member audience, but it's capped as a $29 one-time…”
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