Competitive intelligence: Are you doing it & how?
I am currently wondering about monitoring my competitors, both indirect & direct ones.
I am aware that SEO is a competitive environment & that lots of tools exist to help. However, in my opinion, it should not be limited to this subject: Regularly observing what others are doing can vastly improve how you position yourself, what do you think?
If some of you guys are monitoring your competitors, could you please share:
- how (manually/tools usage/frequency),
- what (subjects that you are looking for, pricing/features/PR...),
- & why (improve commercial tactics, marketing positioning, define roadmap...)?
Thank you for your help.
Trending on Indie Hackers
AI is disrupting SaaS competitive intelligence by automating monitoring of pricing, features, and PR, reducing the need for frequent manual checks and allowing founders to focus on customer insights over constant competitor obsession. Quarterly audits combined with AI-driven tools can validate market fit early, but balancing this with direct customer feedback prevents feature wars and ensures sustainable differentiation in maturing markets.
I agee. CI needs to be an ongoing activity - otherwise you will find yourself losing sales because you are not proactively responding to your competitors moves.
So I've found that looking at competitors is a good way to understand where a market is + if it's worth moving into.
To do competitor research I typically start by looking at keywords --> good competitors will message around a marketplaces' central keywords so looking at search volume is a good way to quickly hone in on who the big competitors are. You can try Keywords Everywhere to do this.
Then I look at the pool of competitors. I'm looking to understand their value propositions + more importantly to understand what market they see themselves in and who their customers are. I find that there's such variety to customers and competitors help me understand how the market is broken down... you'll usually find out about customers by seeing a competitor's twitter feed or blog posts or their support forum if they have it.
Also, the whole time I'm also collecting keywords because really what I'm hunting for is the audience...
So I've found that competitor research is useful at first but once you find your customers it's better to stop paying too much attention to the competitors. If you've found a good market then new people are popping up looking for a solution to their issues + all you really need to do is be seen as the best alternative... that's really all about what the customer thinks and you're only going to learn that from them. Trying to reverse engineer the competitors puts you into a feature war / follower position.
Anyway... my 2c
Great 2c :)
In my opinion, we strive to surpass our competitors, no matter what. But once done, I prefer paying attention at least once a quarter for safe measure (new features that could surpass us...). Don't you agree?
Hmmm... well I think that really depends...
In an early market your competitors are your best friends... customers don't know about what you're offering and your competitors help get the word out.
In a maturing market competitors don't matter because new customers are being created all the time. Usually there are plenty of different positions you can take within a market that don't put you in direct competition with competitors. All that matters is that new customers see your product as a good solution.
In a later stage market yeah you are fighting to see who will be the winner... but I think you win that fight by listening to the customers. I guess it's probably good to keep an eye on the competitors but honestly if the competitors do something good then your customers will tell you about it. If you ever read the book 'the hard thing about hard things' Ben Horowitz found out that their product needed to be improved because when they'd try to sell it the customers would go with their competitor instead... so that's really how you know if you should be paying attention to your competitor.
Just because your competitor has a feature doesn't mean it's a good feature. I think a lot of the best product opportunities involve NOT having features that your competitors have... so again you get that from understanding customers instead of competitors.
I couldn't agree more (even if the context can involve slight differences ;)
As the market my company is trying to reach is quite early, are you suggesting that I should not "lose time" on monitoring my competitors?
Aside from this subject, I haven't read the book you mentioned. Do you recommend it?
You say your market is quite early. What do you mean? Does that mean there are no competitors or that you haven't found them?
In either of those cases that would be a red flag for me. I haven't had much success doing that. What those signals meant for me was that there really wasn't a market there (despite me wanting there to be).
If you're not sure then I think it is definitely worth doing some market research. While you don't want to obsess about your competitors you definitely need to be able to articulate why you're different / better than the alternatives.
Re the book -->
That book is interesting if you want to hear about a first-hand account of what it's like to be a CEO in a venture backed startup.
Well, I am probably wrong in telling it is a early market. We have lots of indirect competitors (same customers but not the same way of tackling the problem) & almost no direct ones.
The related market is very huge and as we propose a very different approach in resolving the problem, we need to be good at explaining our value proposition, work more on our market positioning & do a lot of brand awareness.
Nevertheless, thank you for enlightening me on this competitive subject.
I've added them to Statwatch, but I rarely look at their progress. I basically ignore them unless there's an opportunity to cooperate with them.
Thank you for sharing your tracking service. What do you look for particularly to know if there is an opportunity to cooperate?
It's usually pretty apparent. E.g., If they have a YouTube channel, we can do a crossover video collaboration and both gain subscribers.