Competitor Profile
One file per competitor worth understanding properly. The summary row goes in stack/03-market/market.md; the detail lives here.
Profile the ones you would lose to, not the ones you beat easily. A competitive analysis full of companies you are better than is a comfort exercise.
Basics
| Name | |
| Website | |
| Founded | |
| Headquarters / where they operate | |
| Size — staff, revenue if known | |
| Funding | |
| Type | ☐ Direct ☐ Incumbent doing it badly ☐ Adjacent platform ☐ Informal alternative ☐ New entrant ☐ Doing nothing |
What they sell
| Product | Price | To whom | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Where the prices came from: [their site / a quote you requested / a customer told you / a shelf you looked at]
Actual observed prices only. A price you assumed is worse than a blank.
How they sell
| Channels | |
| Marketing | |
| Where they are strong | |
| Where they are absent | |
| Positioning, in their own words |
Why customers pick them
[ ]
Say it generously. If you cannot make a genuine case for choosing them, you have not understood the market — and you will lose to the reason you did not write down.
Why customers leave them
[ ]
From reviews, forums, from customers you have spoken to, or from trying the product yourself. Not from assumption.
Have you actually tried it?
| Bought / used it? | |
| What was good | |
| What was bad | |
| What surprised you |
Buy the competitor's product. Order it, receive it, use it, contact their support. An afternoon and a small amount of money buys you more than any amount of desk research — and it is regularly how founders discover that the well-marketed rival has terrible fulfilment, which is the gap they should be attacking.
Where you win, where you lose
| Them | You | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ||
| Quality | ||
| Speed | ||
| Reliability | ||
| Range | ||
| Distribution | ||
| Brand and trust | ||
| Support |
The customer who should correctly choose them: [be specific — a real profile, a real situation]
The customer who should correctly choose you: [ ]
If those two answers are the same person, your positioning is not finished.
Threat level
| Immediate threat | ☐ High ☐ Medium ☐ Low |
| Threat in 24 months | ☐ High ☐ Medium ☐ Low |
| What would change that |
Watch for: [what they would have to do for this to become urgent — enter your city, drop their price, add your feature, raise a round]
Notes
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
Check quarterly. Set a reminder. Competitors change price and positioning quietly, and finding out from a customer is the expensive way.
The two you probably have not profiled
The incumbent doing it badly. Often large, sometimes government or heavily subsidised, product genuinely worse than yours — and given away free or near-free. Free-and-bad beats good-and-paid more often than founders expect, and you cannot out-price free. Work out what makes someone pay anyway.
The adjacent platform. The bigger player one step away who could add what you do in a quarter, to an audience they already have. Especially acute in software, where large AI ecosystems now absorb narrow use cases quickly. If your entire product could be a feature inside something your customers already use, that is worth knowing now — and it is a reason some founders are better served building something a platform cannot absorb.
Generated from worksheets/competitor-profile.md in the repository. Edit the markdown, not this page.