I Researched 30+ SaaS Competitors. The Hardest Part Wasn't Finding Them.

I thought competitor research was going to be the easy part of building a SaaS.

Find the competitors.
Check their websites.
Compare their features.
Look at their pricing.
Figure out what to build.
Simple, right?

Not quite.

After researching 30+ SaaS products, I realized the hardest part wasn't finding competitors.

It was figuring out what their success actually meant for us.

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Finding competitors is surprisingly easy

When you have a new SaaS idea, you can find competitors pretty quickly.
Google.
Product Hunt.
Reddit.
App Store.
X.
A few searches and suddenly you have a list.

Then you open their websites.

And the research begins.

You look at:

• Pricing
• Features
• Positioning
• Customer reviews
• Marketing channels
• Content
• SEO
• Social media

At first, it feels productive.

You're learning about the market.

You're making progress.

Then you open another tab.

And another.

And another.

Before you know it, you've spent hours researching products that have almost nothing in common with yours.

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The spreadsheet problem

I started thinking about how founders usually organize this information.

A spreadsheet seems like the obvious answer.

Competitor name.

Website.

Pricing.

Features.

Traffic.

Keywords.

Social media.

Notes.

Everything in one place.

But eventually, you end up with something that looks like this:

30 competitors.

Hundreds of data points.

A lot of notes.

And one very important question:

"Okay... what should we actually do with this?"

That's where things get interesting.

Because collecting information and making decisions are two completely different things.

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What does a successful competitor actually teach you?

Let's say you find a SaaS that has grown to $20k MRR.

You look at their website.

Their positioning is clear.

Their pricing makes sense.

Their product looks polished.

Their content is everywhere.

Your first thought:

"We should do something similar."

But then you start asking questions.

Did they grow through SEO?

Or did they already have an audience?

Did their founder have a distribution advantage?

Did they launch at the right time?

Did they solve a problem that was more painful than yours?

Was their market less competitive when they started?

You can't always tell from the outside.

And that's the problem.

A competitor's success is not automatically a strategy you can copy.

You need to understand the context behind it.

---

More data doesn't always mean better decisions

This is something I've been thinking about a lot.

You can spend an entire day researching a niche.

You can know:

• Who the biggest players are.
• What their products cost.
• Which keywords they rank for.
• What their users complain about.
• What channels they use.
• What features they offer.

And still have no idea whether your own idea is worth pursuing.

At some point, research stops being useful.

It becomes a way to delay making a decision.

I think a lot of indie hackers can relate to this.

You tell yourself:

"I just need to do a little more research."

But what you really need is a better way to turn that research into action.

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This is why we're building Fountrail

While working on our own products, we kept running into this problem.

We didn't just want to know what competitors were doing.

We wanted to understand:

What can we learn from them?

Where are the opportunities?

Which channels are worth testing?

What should we focus on first?

And eventually:

What should our next move be?

That's the idea behind Fountrail.

A platform for researching markets, analyzing competitors, and building a more actionable startup strategy.

The goal is not to replace research.

It's to make research more useful.

Because the best competitor analysis isn't the one with the most data.

It's the one that helps you make a better decision.

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We're still figuring it out

Fountrail is still early.

We're experimenting with different ways to help founders go from:

"Here's what the market looks like."

to:

"Here's what I should consider doing next."

We don't have the perfect answer yet.

And I'm sure we'll get things wrong.

But I think the problem is worth exploring.

Especially for indie hackers who don't have a big marketing team, a huge budget, or months to spend researching every possible opportunity.

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I'd love to hear how you do competitor research

When you're starting a new SaaS, what's your process?

Do you use:

• Spreadsheets?
• Notion?
• Similarweb?
• Ahrefs?
• Product Hunt?
• Reddit?
• AI tools?
• Or just a bunch of browser tabs?

And more importantly:

What do you do after collecting all that information?

Have you ever spent hours researching a niche, only to realize you still didn't know what to build or how to promote it?

I'd love to hear how other indie hackers approach this.

We're building Fountrail around this problem, and I'm curious whether it's something other founders struggle with too.

Let's compare notes.