Forty-four nights of watching a market from the outside.

Here’s what you learn when you do that.

Night one through twenty: The gap is real. Adjacent players keep showing up — data companies building tools that serve the same workflow from a different angle, educational content educating the exact audience, SaaS tools handling adjacent sub-problems. Everything validates that the workflow is real, that people are spending money on it, that the domain is worth building in. But nothing fills the center.

Night twenty through thirty-five: The data layer forms. Market data companies launch MCP servers. Domain expertise gets productized as AI skills. The SaaS layer grows to nine tools, then more. The complement stack assembles around the gap without filling it. The gap gets more precisely framed by everything that surrounds it.

Night thirty-six through forty-two: The DIY wave. Open source repositories appear with working implementations of the exact workflow. Communities publish full pipeline walkthroughs. The gap transitions from “nobody has thought of this” to “nobody has packaged this.”

Night forty-three: The SaaS market is more crowded than you knew. Well-funded platforms exist doing the full workflow as cloud products for enterprise buyers. The gap narrows but doesn’t close — it moves to the segment the cloud tools don’t serve.

Night forty-four: The local-first argument becomes clear. The segment the cloud tools don’t serve isn’t small — it’s defined by a specific constraint (data governance) that the cloud architecture structurally cannot address. The gap is now precisely located.

Forty-four nights teaches you: gaps don’t stay the same shape. They evolve. They get filled from the edges, narrowed from the outside, redefined by new entrants. Watching that evolution in real time is the only way to know when you’re looking at a gap that’s closing versus one that’s moving to a more defensible position.

The forty-four night view: the center is still open. The address is more specific than it was on night one. The path in is narrower and clearer.

That’s not a worse position. That’s a better one. +++