Competitor Landscape Map

You show the owner who they are really up against, from the buyer's point of view, using only evidence anyone could check. The map includes the obvious rivals, the alternatives buyers actually choose instead (a spreadsheet, an agency, doing nothing), and where the open space is. Every claim about a competitor is sourced and dated, because competitors change their pricing and products without notice.

When to use

• "Who are our competitors and how do we compare?"
• "We need a competition slide for the deck."
• "How is X priced compared with us?"
• "Where is the gap in this market?"
• Before a pricing change, a launch, or entering a new segment.

What you need

• A clear description of the owner's product, target customer and price, so you compare like with like.
• Names the owner already considers competitors, and where they hear about them (lost deals, customer conversations). If the CRM is connected (HubSpot, Salesforce), lost-deal reasons and named competitors are valuable.
• web_search, web_extract and your browser. Public sources only.

Method

1. Define the job. Write one sentence on the job customers hire the product to do ("get patient appointments booked without phone calls"). Competitors are anything customers use for that job, not only companies that look similar.
2. Build the long list from several routes, so you do not miss anyone:
   • search for the category and the job, in the target languages
   • review and comparison sites in the category, app stores and marketplace listings
   • "alternatives to " and " vs" pages
   • the owner's lost deals and customer conversations
   • investor and startup databases' free pages, and recent funding news
3. Categorise each entry:
   • direct: same job, same customer, similar solution
   • indirect: same job, different solution or customer (a broader suite with this as a feature, an agency)
   • substitutes and do-nothing: spreadsheets, email, manual process, an in-house tool, or not solving it Keep 5 to 10 for deep profiles (mostly direct, plus the most common indirect and the do-nothing option); keep the rest in a short list.
4. Profile each deep competitor with references/competitor-profile-template.md, from public sources only:
   • website, product pages, documentation and changelog (what they actually ship, how fast)
   • pricing page, captured with the date; use archived copies in the Wayback Machine to see pricing history
   • target customer, from case studies, logos and messaging
   • reviews on independent review sites: read enough to see patterns (aim for 20 or more per competitor across sites) and note recurring praise and complaints; do not generalise from one review
   • job postings (hiring for sales in a new region, or engineers for a new product, signals strategy)
   • company filings for public companies, funding announcements, headcount trends where publicly visible
   • news and press releases from the last 12 months
5. Normalise pricing for comparison: same currency, per month, per comparable unit (per seat, per location, per 1,000 contacts), and annual versus monthly billing stated. Note what each tier includes and hidden costs such as onboarding fees or required add-ons.
6. Compare capabilities in a matrix limited to what buyers care about (from the owner's sales conversations and recurring review themes), not every feature. Mark each cell yes, partial, no or unknown, with a source link for every yes and partial.
7. Draw a positioning map with two axes buyers actually use to choose, such as price against breadth, or ease of use against depth for experts. Place competitors on evidence (pricing, review themes), and explain each placement in one line.
8. Find the openings: segments nobody serves well, recurring complaints nobody fixes, price points left empty, channels nobody uses. Label these as your inference, with the evidence behind each.
9. Stay ethical: public information only. No posing as a customer to get demos or pricing under false pretences, no use of leaked or confidential documents, no logging into competitor products with accounts obtained for that purpose, no scraping that breaks a site's terms. If the owner wants a hands-on trial, they decide whether and how to sign up honestly.
10. Date the whole thing and set a cronjob reminder to refresh pricing and news quarterly.

Output

# Competitor landscape: <market>, <date>

## Summary
<4 to 6 sentences: who matters most, how buyers choose, where the owner is strong and weak, the clearest opening.>

## The field
| Competitor | Type | Target customer | Positioning (their words) | Entry price (normalised) | Notable recent move | Sources |

## Capability matrix (buyer-critical only)
## Pricing comparison
## Positioning map
<Mermaid quadrant chart or a described 2x2, with one-line justification per placement>

## Strengths and weaknesses (from reviews and evidence)
## Openings (our inference)
## Gaps in the evidence
## Sources (URL, publisher, date, accessed)

Put the field table and the map on a show_card.

Checks before you finish

• Every competitor claim has a source and a capture date.
• Prices are normalised and the basis is stated.
• The do-nothing or in-house option is included.
• Review themes are based on many reviews, not a handful.
• Openings are labelled as inference with their evidence.
• Nothing was gathered through deception or non-public access.

Pitfalls

• Only listing look-alikes. Buyers often choose a spreadsheet or nothing. That is the real competitor in many markets.
• Feature-count matrices. Fifty rows of ticks hide what matters. Keep to buyer-critical capabilities.
• Trusting competitor marketing. "Enterprise-grade" is a claim; reviews and documentation are evidence.
• Stale pricing. Prices change often. Date every capture.
• Unfair comparisons. Comparing the owner's best tier with a rival's cheapest one misleads the owner.
• Sign-off. Any comparison published externally (website, ads, sales material) must be accurate and fair; the owner should have it reviewed for legal risk under local comparative advertising rules before publishing.

Profile template: references/competitor-profile-template.md.