If you're an indie dev, you've probably heard some version of this advice: "don't guess what to build — look at real demand data." I build a product called Idea Miner that's built entirely on that premise: it mines real, budget-backed paid tasks from global outsourcing platforms and surfaces the demand patterns that keep recurring.
A few days ago someone ran an outside teardown of the site and pointed out something embarrassing: a task literally titled "On-Site Physical Business Verification" was tagged under "Web Development." Not close. Not a stretch. Just wrong.
My first instinct was to explain it away — one weird edge case, not representative. So I wrote a script to actually check. Out of 3,401 published demand features, 1,446 of them (42.5%) carried the exact same wrong label. Not a handful of outliers. Almost half the catalog.
That's the story I actually want to tell here — not because "we fixed a bug" is interesting on its own, but because of what it means for any indie dev who leans on "real data" (mine or anyone else's) to decide what to build.
"The data source is real" and "the data is accurate" are not the same claim
