Competitor analysis in a day

Competitor research can easily expand into weeks of screenshots and spreadsheets that never lead to a decision. For most founders, marketers and analysts, a focused day is enough to get the picture right and decide what to do. The trick is to time-box each step and end with conclusions.

Before you start: define the customer’s job

Write one sentence describing what the customer is trying to get done. “Keep my small business’s accounts in order without hiring a bookkeeper” is better than “accounting software”, because it lets you see every alternative, not just the products that look like yours.

Hour one: map the field

List at least ten alternatives in three groups:

• Direct competitors: similar products sold to the same customer.
• Indirect competitors: different ways to solve the same problem, such as a freelancer, an agency, a spreadsheet template or a general tool used creatively.
• Doing nothing: customers who put up with the problem. This is often the most common choice of all.

Then pick the five that matter most. Customer interviews, search results and “alternatives to” pages are good guides to which names come up most.

Rest of the morning: gather public facts

Most of what you need is public. For each of the five, capture:

Reviews deserve the most time. Read at least twenty across the set, and note the phrases customers repeat in both praise and complaint. The complaints are where opportunities hide.

First half of the afternoon: compare

Choose four to six factors customers care about, such as price, ease of setup, support, specific features or speed. Give each a weight so the weights add up to one. Score each competitor, and yourself honestly, from one to five on each factor, then multiply by the weight. This scored table is sometimes called a competitor array.

An illustration with invented scores:

The point is not the final score. It is seeing where each option is strong and weak, and where nobody scores well.

Second half of the afternoon: widen the view and conclude

Michael Porter’s five forces, set out in Harvard Business Review in 1979 and updated in 2008, remind you that rivalry is only one pressure on profits. Spend twenty minutes on the other four:

• Threat of new entrants: how easy is it for someone new to start?
• Power of suppliers: do you depend on one platform, marketplace or provider?
• Power of buyers: can customers switch easily or push prices down?
• Threat of substitutes: what different kind of product could make yours unnecessary?

Then write:

1. Three conclusions, each one sentence. For example: “No rival is easy to set up for very small firms.”
2. One decision you will act on, such as a change to positioning, price, a feature or a target customer.

A short SWOT, listing your strengths and weaknesses alongside the opportunities and threats you found, can be a tidy way to present this to others.

Presenting what you found

Keep the output short: one page with the map of alternatives, the scored table, the three conclusions and the decision. Put the raw notes, screenshots and review quotes in an appendix or a shared folder for anyone who wants detail. Readers trust a clear conclusion more when they can see the evidence is there, but few want to read all of it.

Staying honest

• Score yourself as a customer would, not as the founder would.
• Do not use deception to gather information, such as posing as a buyer to get private materials.
• Date your findings. Prices and messages change.
• Repeat a lighter version every quarter rather than a big project once a year.

A day will not tell you everything about a market, but it is usually enough to see where the gaps are and which question to research next.