Understand your customers

Competitive & market research

Know the landscape better than the incumbents.

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How do I research my competitors properly? Go beyond their homepage: sign up, read their reviews, their churned-customer complaints, their job posts, and their pricing page. The gold is in w... Beginner 2 resources → What if my customers say they have no competitors, is that good or bad? Almost always bad, because it usually means the job isn't painful enough to spend money or effort on. If nobody's built anything, ask what people c... Beginner 2 resources → What tools should I use to track competitors and market landscape? Start free and manual before you pay for anything: Google Alerts and their newsletter for moves, G2/Capterra reviews for weaknesses, Crunchbase for... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I position against a bigger, better-funded competitor? Don't fight them on their strengths, reframe the category so your strengths matter most. Anchor on the competitive alternatives your best customers... Advanced 2 resources → How do I size the market and figure out if it's big enough? Build it bottom-up, not from a scary McKinsey top-down number: who exactly is the customer, how many are there, what will they pay, and how will yo... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I understand the competitive landscape for an Indian market specifically? Don't assume the US playbook maps onto India, pricing power, distribution, and willingness-to-pay are wildly different. Study who Indian customers ... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I do competitive research when my competitors are private and share almost no public numbers? Stop hunting for a leaked cap table and read the signals that are actually public: job postings (what they're building and where they're weak), pri... Intermediate 3 resources → Is it worth building a feature comparison matrix, or does it just make me copy my competitors? A comparison matrix is useful for one thing only: seeing where everyone piles on the same features so you can deliberately go somewhere else. It be... Beginner 2 resources → How much time should a solo founder actually spend on competitive research before just building? As a rough starting point, cap the first pass at a few focused days: enough to know who the top three players are, roughly how they price, and what... Beginner 2 resources → My market has one dominant player with 80% share. Is that a red flag or a sign the market is real? A single dominant player usually proves the market has money and demand, which is good, but it also means you can't win by being a slightly better ... Advanced 3 resources → How do I research a market in India where reliable data and analyst reports basically don't exist? For most Indian early-stage markets the top-down report you want either doesn't exist or is a recycled global number with a made-up India multiplie... Intermediate 3 resources → When a big competitor announces they're building the exact feature I'm known for, what do I actually do? First, don't panic: a giant announcing a feature is not the same as shipping it well, and their version will be one checkbox in a bloated suite whi... Advanced 2 resources → How do I tell the difference between a real competitor and a company customers only mention because it's famous? The competitor that matters is the one prospects actually consider and put budget against, not the household name they cite out of habit. Ask in ev... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I do competitive research for a brand-new category where there are no direct competitors yet? No direct competitors almost never means no competition, it means you're competing against how people solve the problem today, however clumsily. Ma... Advanced 3 resources → What are the most common mistakes founders make when sizing their market, and how do I avoid faking a big TAM? The classic mistake is starting from a giant global number and multiplying down with invented percentages (the 1% of a billion-dollar market trap),... Intermediate 3 resources → As a non-technical founder, how do I research a market where I don't understand the technical products my competitors sell? You don't need to understand the internals to research well, you need to understand what the product does for the buyer and where it falls short, w... Beginner 2 resources → How do I keep tracking competitors without it turning into a daily anxiety spiral that distracts me from my own product? Turn competitive watching from a compulsive habit into a scheduled ritual: batch it into one short review a week or every two weeks, write a two-li... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I research whether a market is big enough to matter but small enough that big players will ignore it? You're looking for the sweet spot that's a real business for you but a rounding error for a giant, and the test is simple: could this market ever p... Advanced 3 resources →

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