Competitor teardown

"We have no competitors" worries investors more than a crowded market: customers always solve their problem somehow. This skill lists those alternatives, studies the strongest ones closely, and turns what their customers complain about into openings.

When to use

• Before positioning, pricing or building the MVP.
• For the competition slide of a pitch-deck.
• Not to judge how attractive a whole industry is: use porter-five-forces from boardroom if it is installed.

Inputs

1. The problem and the target customer.
2. The competitors the founder already knows.
3. The geography.

Method

1. List every alternative, in four groups: direct competitors (same solution, same customer), indirect solutions (a different product doing the same job), workarounds (spreadsheets, freelancers, doing it by hand), and doing nothing. Ask the jobs-to-be-done question: what do customers "hire" today to get this done?
2. Pick three to five to take apart: the ones customers actually use, not the ones that look most similar.
3. Take each one apart: target customer, promise (the headline of its website), offer and features, price and pricing model, channels (how it finds customers), size or funding if public, and what its customers say.
4. Mine the reviews: app stores, Google reviews, software review sites, Trustpilot, Reddit, forums. Group complaints and praise by theme, count them, and quote a few with the link and the date.
5. Compare on what customers value, not on the founder's feature list: a table, or a positioning map on two axes that matter to customers.
6. Find the gaps: underserved segments, complaints nobody fixes, offers that are too expensive or too complex, missing channels. For each gap, say why incumbents leave it open, or how easily they could close it.
7. Be fair: write down what each competitor does better than the founder's project.

Output

### Alternatives map
| Alternative | Type (direct, indirect, workaround, nothing) | Who uses it | Why |
|---|---|---|---|

### Teardown
| | Competitor A | Competitor B | Our project |
|---|---|---|---|
| Target | | | |
| Promise | | | |
| Price | | | |
| Channels | | | |
| Top complaints (count) | | | |

### Gaps we can use
1. <gap>: evidence, why incumbents leave it open, how we use it

Quality bar

• Indirect solutions and "doing nothing" are included; the answer is never "no competitors".
• Prices, features and figures come from the competitors' own pages or filings, with the link and the date accessed; review counts are real counts.
• Each gap is backed by evidence and considers how incumbents could react.
• The comparison says where competitors are stronger.
• Written in the user's language, with the terms below.

Terminology

Sources

• Porter, M. E. (1980). Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Free Press.
• Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. S. (2016). Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. HarperBusiness.