Tracking Your Startup Competitors — Founder Club
Finding your startup competitors should be part of your market research. Your competitors are important because you can gain tremendous insights by observing their marketing, financing and business models.
Ideally, you should be able to answer the following questions about your startup competitors:
- Marketing: Which customer segments are your competitors serving? If you can see your competitor serves men, aged 34–59, married, with avg of 2 kids, median household income of 150.000/year- then you know who you could include, or who to exclude in your marketing
- Financing: How are your competitors doing when it comes to their finances? Are they profitable? Do they have a large market share? Have they raised funding? Have they suffered losses? These answers will help you benchmark your own performance for comparison.
- Business Model: Are your competitors engaging in direct calling/emailing, field sales (office visits) or paid advertising to acquire new customers? Do they employ a monthly subscription model or do they use annual contracting?
Ultimately, your startup competitors are very important. Tracking your competitors is a healthy and necessary part of the market research phase, immediately after you identify a startup idea you would like to work on. Knowing your startup competition could help you improve your own performance, help you spot market opportunities and/or avoid observed mistakes.
I hope that you found this post insightful!
If you’re interested to learn how I can help you address specific bottlenecks in your startup, I also offer 1:1 consulting.
During our session, you can ask me specific questions about your startup ideas, operations, financials, recruiting, marketing, sales and/or professional development.
