The hardest part of competitor research isn't finding competitors
I've spent a lot of time researching competitors.
And I noticed something strange.
Finding competitors is actually easy.
Google them.
Search Product Hunt.
Check Reddit.
Look at App Store results.
Search for them on X.
You can usually build a list of 10–20 competitors pretty quickly.
The hard part comes after that.
What do you actually do with the list?
Let's say you're launching a new SaaS.
You find 15 competitors.
You collect:
- their pricing
- features
- traffic
- keywords
- social accounts
- reviews
- positioning
- acquisition channels
You now have a spreadsheet with a ridiculous amount of information.
And then you look at it and think:
"Okay... so what?"
😂
That's the part I don't think enough tools solve.
Data doesn't automatically become strategy
Knowing that your competitor gets traffic from SEO doesn't mean SEO is the right channel for you.
Knowing that they have 50,000 followers doesn't mean you should start posting on X.
Knowing that customers complain about a feature doesn't automatically mean you should build that feature.
Context matters.
Your product is different.
Your resources are different.
Your audience is different.
Your stage is different.
So the real question isn't:
"What are my competitors doing?"
It's:
"What can I learn from what they're doing, and what should I do differently?"
That's a much harder question.
This is the problem we're trying to solve with Fountrail
We're experimenting with ways to turn competitor and market research into something much more actionable.
Not just:
"Here is what your competitors are doing."
But:
"Here is what it might mean for your product."
And eventually:
"Here are the next things worth testing."
We're still figuring out the best way to do this.
But this is becoming one of the core ideas behind Fountrail.
Curious how other founders do this
When you start a new product, what's your competitor research process?
Do you use a specific tool?
A spreadsheet?
Notion?
A bunch of browser tabs?
Or do you mostly rely on intuition?
I'm especially interested in what happens after you've collected the data.
Because that's where I think the interesting problem begins.
