Building in Public
A few months ago, I thought the problem we were solving was competitor monitoring.
I was wrong.
After dozens of conversations with product marketers, marketing leaders, founders, and sales enablement teams, I realized most companies don't actually struggle to find competitor information.
The information is everywhere.
Pricing pages.
Changelogs.
LinkedIn posts.
Review sites.
Ads.
Hiring activity.
News.
Reddit discussions.
The real problem is turning all of that into something useful before it affects positioning, pipeline, or sales conversations.
Most teams are still piecing together a workflow from spreadsheets, AI tools, browser bookmarks, Slack messages, and whatever process evolved organically over time.
It works until it doesn't.
Someone leaves.
The spreadsheet stops getting updated.
A competitor changes direction.
Customers start mentioning something your team missed.
That's the problem we've spent the last few months building around.
What started as a simple monitoring product evolved into a system that pulls together 350+ sources across 30+ channels into one weekly cited briefing.
One thing we became obsessed with during development:
Every claim should link back to its source.
The more we looked at the competitive intelligence market, the more we saw a trust problem.
People don't want another dashboard full of alerts.
They want evidence.
If a competitor changes pricing, launches enterprise-focused ads, rewrites their messaging, or starts hiring a new segment of sales reps, teams need to understand both what changed and why it matters.
Another thing we learned:
There is a huge gap between enterprise CI platforms and doing everything manually.
Companies evaluating tools like Klue, Crayon, and Kompyte often end up stuck between enterprise pricing and DIY workflows.
That's a big part of why we made the decision to publish pricing publicly.
IndustryLens starts at €59/month.
No demo gate.
No sales call required just to understand pricing.
We're launching publicly on Product Hunt next week — Wednesday, June 17.
Current state:
350+ sources across 30+ channels monitored in one weekly cited briefing
Every claim links back to its source
Published pricing from €59/month (Starter) — Growth €149/month, Professional €249/month
30-day free trial
PRODUCTHUNT20 for 20% off the first 3 months during launch
We're still fixing edge cases, improving briefing quality, and removing things that looked good in planning documents but weren't actually useful in practice.
That's been one of the biggest lessons of building this.
Users care far less about features than founders think they do.
They care about outcomes.
I'd genuinely love feedback from the Indie Hackers community before we launch.
If you're responsible for competitor tracking today, how are you doing it?
Dedicated tool?
Internal process?
AI + spreadsheets?
Something else entirely?
Right now mine is the messy version you described: a bookmark folder and the occasional "wait, when did they change that?" panic. The "every claim links to its source" bit is what'd sell me.
That's exactly the workflow we kept running into.
The information usually isn't hard to find. It's the "when did that change?" part that gets painful. A pricing page update, a new ad campaign, a homepage rewrite, everyone vaguely remembers seeing it, but nobody knows when it happened or whether it matters.
We ended up obsessing over citations for that reason. If a claim can't be traced back to the source, it's hard to trust and even harder to share internally. That's why every insight links back to the underlying source so you can verify it yourself instead of taking our word for it.
Curious, what's the last competitor change you found out about later than you would have liked?
One thing I'd be careful with:
The interesting question may not be whether companies need better competitive intelligence.
It may be what decision they're actually trying to make once they have it.
Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different conclusions about who the product is really for and what outcomes deserve to be optimized.
I wouldn't make that call casually from early launch signals.
I agree.
"Better competitive intelligence" is easy to say, but it's not actually the outcome most teams are buying.
A PMM might want better positioning decisions. A sales leader might want stronger competitive responses in deals. A founder might just want to know whether a competitor's move is worth reacting to at all.
The information itself is only useful if it reduces uncertainty around a decision.
We're trying to be careful not to confuse "people are interested in competitor data" with "we understand the job they're hiring the product to do." Early signals are useful, but they're definitely not the same thing as product truth.
I think that's where it gets interesting.
A lot of products end up learning something real and still drawing the wrong conclusion from it.
Hard to explain properly in a couple of comments, though.
If you're curious, drop your email and I'll send over the fuller thought.
here is my email: access@industry-lens.com
Just sent you a note.