u/pranshumaan

Six months ago I was trying to decide between two category ideas. Both felt real. Both had Reddit threads full of complaints. But I had no way to compare them systematically — who was already in each space, how crowded it actually was, whether the brands there were growing or coasting, and whether the demand signal was new or old noise.

So I did something dumb: I spent three weeks building a spreadsheet. Manual Googling. Instagram follower counts copied by hand. YouTube subscriber counts from six different tabs.

Then I gave up on the spreadsheet and built an actual tool.

Today impuls8 tracks 1,042 Indian D2C brands across 19 categories, 100 subcategories and 429 micro-niches. We pull Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Google Trends data every week. The goal is dead simple: before you pick a category, see the actual landscape.

Things that surprised me while building this:

1. Food & Beverage is by far the most crowded category — 130 brands, and growing. Beauty is only 76. The absolute brand count is the opposite of what most people assume.
2. Women's health has 5 distinct sub-niches (PCOS, hormonal health, prenatal/postnatal, menopause, bone & joint) but the brand coverage is wildly uneven. PCOS is crowded. Menopause support has almost nobody.
3. Pets has 20 brands but pet dental care is essentially empty. Heads Up For Tails and Supertails have built great general pet stores — but nobody has gone deep on a specific sub-segment.
4. Sustainable/eco has 21 brands. Shampoo bars and solid haircare (zero-waste personal care) is genuinely thin — Bare Necessities is doing it, most others aren't.

None of this is secret information. It's all publicly visible if you know where to look and you've built a system to look. The frustrating thing is most pre-launch founders don't have that system.

If you're trying to pick a category right now, happy to pull the landscape data for you. Also giving out free access to the tool.