Course resource

Competitor Analysis Template

A structure for understanding competitors without producing forty pages nobody reads.

The rule that governs this

AI will confidently invent competitor facts. Funding rounds, headcounts, pricing, customer numbers — all plausible, all fabricated. Use AI to structure the analysis and to interpret what you find. Get the facts from primary sources: their site, their pricing page, their job ads, their filings, their customers.

Every cell in the table below should be traceable to something you can point at.

Who to analyse

Three, not ten. Pick:

  1. The direct competitor — closest to what you do, for the same buyer
  2. The alternative — what customers use instead, which is often a spreadsheet, an agency, or doing nothing
  3. The one that worries you — different model, moving toward you

The second one is where most of the insight is and the one most analyses omit.

The table

Us Competitor A Competitor B The alternative
Who they sell to
Stated positioning
Price and model
What they are visibly good at
What customers complain about
How they acquire customers
What they have that we cannot copy quickly
What we have that they cannot
Direction they are moving

Where to actually look

Source Tells you
Pricing page Model, tiers, who they optimise for, what is gated
Job ads Where they are investing — the most reliable signal of direction
Changelog / release notes Real pace and priorities
Review sites, sorted by lowest rating Where they genuinely fail
Their customers' public posts What people actually use it for
Support docs Complexity, and which problems recur
Their homepage over time, via an archive How their positioning has shifted

Job ads and one-star reviews are the two highest-signal sources and the two most people skip.

Prompts

Structuring what you found

Here is what I gathered about [COMPETITOR], all from their own site
and public sources:
[PASTE RAW NOTES]

Organise this into: who they target, positioning, pricing model, apparent
strengths, apparent weaknesses, direction of travel.

Use only what I gave you. Where something is missing, write UNKNOWN.
Do not fill gaps from your training data.

That last instruction is the important one.

Reading the reviews

Here are [N] negative reviews of [COMPETITOR]:
[PASTE]

1. Group the complaints by underlying cause, not surface wording
2. Which are fixable and which are structural to their model?
3. Which of these do WE also have?
4. Which represents a genuine opening for us?

Point 3 is the one people avoid and the one that is useful.

Reading the job ads

Here are [COMPETITOR]'s current job openings:
[PASTE TITLES AND KEY REQUIREMENTS]

What does this tell me about where they are investing?
What are they building that they have not announced?
What does the absence of certain roles suggest?

The honest positioning check

Our claimed differentiator: [WHAT]
Competitor claims: [THEIRS]

Is ours actually a differentiator, or is it table stakes that we simply
state more loudly?
What could they copy in a month? In a year? Not at all?
If a customer compared us side by side today, what would they conclude?

The output

One page. Four sections:

Where we genuinely win. Specific, and defensible for more than a quarter.

Where we genuinely lose. Be honest. This section is the point of the exercise.

What is changing. Direction of travel matters more than the current snapshot.

What we will do about it. Maximum three actions, each with an owner.

If your analysis has no "where we lose" section, you have not done the analysis.

Keeping it current

A competitor analysis is a snapshot that starts decaying immediately.

Date What changed Action taken

What not to do

Back to dashboard