Competitor Teardown — one rival, fully opened up

Most competitor analysis is a screenshot of their pricing page and a shrug. A real teardown reads the machine behind the marketing: what their offer says about their economics, which messages they repeat (repetition means it works), and which weaknesses their own customers already name in public. It ends with strategy, not trivia — the ground you can take that they cannot follow you onto.

Inputs

• The competitor to tear down (name or URL), plus anything already known — lost-deal notes, their ads you have seen, prospect quotes: $ARGUMENTS
• From marketing-brief.md if present: your own offer and position (the teardown compares against them) and this competitor's existing entry under The competitors.

Do this

Inside Claude Code, the numbered passes can be split across the competitor-intelligence agents by name — competitor-profiler, offer-teardown-analyst, positioning-decoder, messaging-analyst, funnel-walker, ad-library-analyst, weakness-hunter. Inline, run them in order.

1. Profile the company. Model, price points, team-size signals, hiring, recent launches — a momentum read in five lines.
2. Tear down the offer. Packaging, tiers, guarantees, bonuses, onboarding friction. Read the economics behind it: heavy sales-touch implies big deal sizes; an aggressive free tier implies land-and-expand. What the offer implies is often more useful than what it says.
3. Decode the positioning. Their claimed position in their own words — homepage headline, about page, ad headlines. Note which claims are crowded (everyone in the category says them) and which ground sits empty.
4. Map the messaging. The hooks and angles they repeat across site, ads, and content. Repetition is the tell — nobody re-runs a loser.
5. Walk the funnel as a buyer. Opt in, note every step, capture the email sequence, record where friction and proof appear.
6. Check the ad libraries. Public archives (Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, LinkedIn's ads tab): what is running, how long it has run, formats, angles. Longevity means spend, and sustained spend means it is working.
7. Hunt the weaknesses. Reviews, complaint threads, community chatter — weaknesses their buyers already feel and say, kept verbatim with sources.
8. Write how we beat them: the ground their model forbids them from following you onto (their pricing, their segment focus, their cost structure), the weakness to press in copy without naming them, and the deals not worth contesting.

Output

A teardown dossier — profile, offer teardown with the economics read, positioning and message map, funnel walkthrough, ad summary, verbatim weakness bank — closing with the how-we-beat-them page. Update this competitor's entry under The competitors in marketing-brief.md with a three-line summary and the exploitable weakness.

Rules

• Only claim what was observed. Every finding carries its source — a URL, a quote, an ad reference. No source, no claim.
• A weakness is only strategy if it is structural. Something they merely have not done yet, they can do next quarter.
• Their customers' complaints outrank your opinions. Verbatim beats paraphrase.
• The goal is asymmetry, not imitation. If the teardown ends in "copy what they do", it has failed.
• Date the teardown. Competitors move — an undated dossier quietly becomes fiction.