8 smart ways to know your competitor better
At which phase of startup we should start analyzing competition?
When someone conceive an idea, he tends to believe that no one else in this world is working on same. At least I believed that before starting my first startup. Truth is that unique ideas are rare to find. There is high possibility that someone is working on same idea somewhere else in this world.
We just have to find our competitors.
At which phase of startup we should start analyzing competition? Don’t you think it is important to do competition analysis even before starting execution?
But how to get internal details of other’s business? Tough job, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s tough but I have learned some ways during my startup journey that I am going to share with you today.
#1 Start with Google
As you can guess, easiest step is to start searching on google. Search with different keywords on google like you are real customer. Prepare a list of companies who are providing similar product in market.
But a lot of potential customers will not appear on first pages of google, may be we are not using proper keywords or some competitors have not done good job at SEO.
#2 Startup Media Platforms
Startups are regularly covered by media platforms like TechCrunch, Mashable and ReadWrite, YourStory and NextBigWhat. Search similar places online where you can find startup stories.
In this process you will build more knowledge about competitive space and positioning of your competitors.
#3 Social Media
Search on social media — on twitter you can use hashtags and keywords of related to your industry.
Subscribe to competitor’s social media, blogs and youtube channel. You will be the first to know about their product announcements, latest features and other news.
#4 Inbound links
Inbound links to competitor’s site will reveal a lot of information. It is very easy to find the inbound links with help of tools like Open Site Explorer. Try to figure out as much information as you can.
You can find recent media coverage, awards, backlinks from customers and investors. Exploring those links will unfold growth story of competitor.
(Same information can later be helpful in building your own backlinks)
#5 Interview Competitor’s Employees
Getting insider information from competitor’s employee — sounds like unethical? But It’s another source of authentic information if you want to do this way.
In my first startup we interviewed employees of few of our competitors. In this process we learned a lot about industry and competitors.
I feel this works more like a Hack when you don’t want to hire but just need little information. You don’t have to play unethical game but conduct regular interview. Even generic information from candidate will help you understand competitive space.
#6 Access to Investor Presentation
Startups prepare presentations for investors and customers. Some presentations can be found in public domain like SlideShare. Spend some time for searching such material.
Some companies like Buffer make investor pitch deck available to public by sharing on blogs. Other places to look for investor presentations are PitchEnvy and Best Pitch Deck.
#7 Product / Training Access
Try out competitor’s product and go through their training material. We were building SaaS based B2B product in previous startup. We went through youtube trainings (which was easy) and managed to get product logins of two competitors (which is usually hard in B2B). You never know what you can find from competitor’s product.
#8 Setting Google Alerts
This is one of best way of getting alerts about your industry and top competitors. Google provides option of creating alerts based on keywords and alert frequency is configurable.
I would like to learn from your experiences, please share you thoughts @pardeepg
