Hi, I'm Michael Tremblay.

I'm a mechanical project manager at a paper mill in Quebec, Canada. That is my day job, and I still do it. Kupkaike is the thing I built at night and on weekends, alone, with AI tools I taught myself to use. No team, no co-founder, no funding.

I say that not as a story about hustle, but because it is the honest version and it explains everything about how Kupkaike works. I am not a developer by training. I am someone who wanted to sell digital products, got it badly wrong, and built the tool I wish I'd had.

The Etsy shop that taught me the lesson

Before any of this, I opened an Etsy shop. I made fifteen listings. Planners, templates, the usual. I was proud of them. They took weeks. Then I sat there and watched them sell zero copies. Not slow sales. Zero.

The products were fine. The problem was that I had built them in a vacuum. I never checked whether anyone actually wanted them before spending my nights making them. I had the order backwards: I made the product first, then went looking for demand. It almost always needs to be the other way around.

So that is what Kupkaike does, and only that: it scores a niche for real buyer demand before you build, and only then helps you create the product. Demand first, product second. The whole tool is one mistake, turned into a workflow.

The Wall Street Journal

In June 2026, the niche strategy behind Kupkaike was featured in The Wall Street Journal. I still find that strange to write. It was never the plan. The idea that picking the right niche matters more than the product itself apparently resonated beyond me and my one dead Etsy shop.

If you want the evidence rather than the anecdote, I published the numbers. I scored 4,388 real niches and wrote up what the data says. The short version: competition, not demand, is what quietly kills most products before they are made.