Customers & Research

How do I do competitive research when my competitors are private and share almost no public numbers?

A starting point

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), pricing page changes over time, review sites, their customers' case studies, and the questions their sales team asks on demo calls you book yourself. Talk to five of their churned customers, that single hour teaches you more than any report. Treat this as assembling a mosaic from many small tiles, not finding one document that explains everything.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Read Use

Read

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it A private competitor that hides its numbers still has to post honest job descriptions to hire, and this piece walks through exactly how to read them. It lays out a repeatable routine: build a watchlist of a few rivals, track the skills, seniority, and locations they hire for, then spot patterns like a new market or a technology bet. The Microsoft Copilot example (AI roles jumped nearly 40 percent months before launch) shows how a roadmap leaks through hiring long before any announcement.

Competitor Hiring Analysis: How Job Postings Reveal Market Strategy

From Intervue by Sugandha Srivastava About a 10 minute read

  • Job descriptions have to be accurate to attract the right people, so they are one of the more honest public signals a private company gives off.
  • Watch patterns, not single posts: a jump in open roles, a new city, or an unfamiliar skill requirement tells you about funding, expansion, or a product bet.
  • A simple LinkedIn job alert per competitor costs thirty seconds to set up and keeps the signal flowing without any scraping tools.
Open intervue.io →
✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it The strongest way to research a private competitor is to talk to the people who left them, and this essay grounds that tactic in a real interview method. Teresa Torres explains the story-based approach, where you collect the customer's actual story of what happened rather than asking leading questions, and she names churned users as a segment worth interviewing to learn what the real problem was. It turns a vague idea (go talk to their ex-customers) into a repeatable habit you can run every week.

Ask Teresa: How Do You Select Customers for Customer Interviews?

From Product Talk by Teresa Torres About a 12 minute read

  • Interview people who churned from a competitor: they tell you the real friction and gaps that no public number would.
  • Use story-based interviewing, spend the time collecting what actually happened, not pitching your own product or asking hypothetical questions.
  • Deliberately vary who you talk to (power users, first-timers, disengaged, churned) so you are not just hearing one slice of the story.
Open producttalk.org →

Use

🛠️ Tool
✓ Link checked Freemium Beginner

Why we picked it When a competitor shares no numbers, their own website still leaks signal, and BuiltWith reads it for you. Paste a private rival's domain and you see their payment processor, analytics, email tool, hosting, ecommerce platform, and ad tech, all without asking them anything. It is the fastest way to turn a competitor you know nothing about into a concrete list of the tools they actually pay for.

BuiltWith Technology Lookup

From BuiltWith by BuiltWith Free lookup, instant per-site scan

  • A competitor's public website exposes their real tech stack (payments, analytics, CRM, hosting), a signal you can read without their cooperation.
  • The free single-site lookup is enough to start: the paid lists and history matter only if you want to track many rivals over time.
  • Tech choices hint at strategy, so a switch to a heavier ecommerce platform or a new analytics tool tells you where a private competitor is investing.
Open builtwith.com →

People also ask

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 →