Competitive Pricing Intelligence for DTC Brands
Building this as a side project from Mongolia (3-4 hours/day).
Started after noticing DTC brands spend 5-10 hours/month manually checking competitor prices, then still make pricing decisions based on gut feel because they lack category-level context.
I scraped 1,601 products from Vuori vs Tenthousand to prove the concept. Found they use completely opposite pricing strategies by category:
- Vuori premium shirts +52%
- Tenthousand premium shorts +35%
Most pricing tools are built for Amazon sellers doing dynamic repricing. Nothing exists for DTC brands who need strategic positioning intelligence.
Launched 8 days ago on Feb 14. First warm lead came Day 1 (X reply → engagement → follow → DM). Still waiting for first conversion.
Currently offering free audits until Feb 28 to validate demand and build testimonials. Goal: First paid client by early March, scale to $6,500 by mid-June.
The hardest part: Finding customers with zero audience. Spending 90% of time on X/Reddit engagement, 10% on actual service delivery.
Would love feedback from anyone who's sold B2B services from scratch.
Really cool concept, Sukhbat! Competitive pricing intelligence is a huge gap in the DTC space. Most tools like Prisync or Competera are built for Amazon/marketplace sellers, not for brands with their own stores.
A few thoughts from building in a similar space (data extraction for businesses):
The scraping part will become your biggest operational challenge as you scale. Sites change their HTML structure constantly, and some use aggressive anti-bot measures. Consider using AI-based extraction instead of traditional CSS selectors - it's way more resilient to site changes.
Your "free audit" approach is smart for early traction. I'd also try reaching out directly to DTC brand founders on LinkedIn who are posting about pricing strategy. They're literally telling you they have this problem.
The 90/10 distribution vs delivery split resonates hard. I'm building LucidExtractor (AI-powered web scraping API) and went through the exact same phase. What helped me was laser-focusing on one acquisition channel instead of spreading across X and Reddit simultaneously.
For your first paid client: instead of waiting for inbound, offer to do a live pricing audit on a video call. Show them their competitors' pricing data in real-time. The "wow factor" of seeing their market mapped out converts way better than any landing page.
Keep building! The DTC market is massive and underserved for this kind of intelligence.
Thanks for the feedback!
1. Scraping resilience - you're right. Already seeing some sites blocking. AI-based extraction sounds promising - will check out LucidExtractor.
2. I tried Linkedin outreach, got rate limited. Focusing on X + Reddit + IH now.
3. Multi-channel spread - good point. Might focus Reddit (higher volume) + IH (higher quality) and reduce X.
4. Live video audit - brilliant idea. "Show don't tell" converts better. Will test this week.
Appreciate the insight from someone who's been through the grind. How long until your first paid client with LucidExtractor?