# Competitor Teardown > Analyze a competitor from public evidence into a decision — positioning, pricing, ICP, go-to-market, weaknesses, and the wedge available to us. Use before entering a market, before pricing, and before writing a landing page. Triggers on "competitors", "who else does this", "how do they price", "differentiate", "market landscape", "are we too late", "competitive analysis". - Skill: `cspoerer62/competitor-teardown` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add cspoerer62/competitor-teardown` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/cspoerer62/competitor-teardown/raw - Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS) - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Marketing & Growth - Author: cspoerer62 (https://skillmd.com/u/cspoerer62) - Updated: 2026-09-22 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/cspoerer62/competitor-teardown --- # Competitor Teardown A competitor analysis that ends in a table is wasted work. It must end in **a decision**: the wedge we take, the price we set, or the conclusion that we don't enter. Uses `research/public-web-research-at-scale` to gather and `thinking/evidence-grading` to grade. Feeds `business/offer-design`, `business/unit-economics`, and `design/web-page-build`. ## Reframe first: competitors are not who you think Before analyzing named vendors, identify the **actual** alternatives, in this order of likelihood: 1. **Doing nothing** — the most common and most-underestimated competitor. The status quo has zero switching cost and infinite political safety. 2. **A spreadsheet / whiteboard / WhatsApp group** — how the job is *really* done in SMB markets. 3. **A person** — a part-time admin, a bookkeeper, an agency. 4. **An adjacent tool being misused** — the CRM used as a scheduler. 5. **Named direct competitors** — usually the smallest share of the decision. **If the real competitor is "nothing," the offer's job is to overcome inertia, not to beat features.** That completely changes the landing page, the pricing, and the sales motion. Getting this wrong is the most expensive error in this skill. ## What to collect per competitor (all grade-A: their own published material) | Field | Where | Why it matters | |---|---|---| | Positioning one-liner | Homepage `

` | Their claimed wedge, in their words | | Target customer | Homepage, case studies, "who it's for" | Reveals the segment they've *conceded* | | **Pricing & packaging** | Pricing page (screenshot/quote verbatim + date) | Sets the market's price anchor | | Feature surface | Product/features pages, changelog, docs | Depth vs breadth | | Proof | Logos, case studies, review counts | How much trust they've banked | | Onboarding friction | Signup flow — self-serve vs "book a demo" | Demo-gate = high ACV, slow, weak self-serve | | GTM channel | Blog cadence, ads, SEO footprint, directories, job posts | Where they spend, where they don't | | Company shape | Registry filings, headcount signals, funding, job posts | Can they respond to us? How fast? | | Weakness signals | Reviews (1–3 star specifically), support forums, churn complaints, stale changelog | Where the wedge is | | Last shipped | Changelog/blog/release notes date | Stale >12mo = a sleeping incumbent = opportunity | **"No pricing published" is itself a finding**: it means enterprise/negotiated, which means slow sales, which means a self-serve wedge is open underneath them. ### Highest-signal sources, in order 1. **Their pricing page** — grade A, quote it verbatim with the fetch date. 2. **Their 1–3 star public reviews** — the single richest source. Sort by lowest, read 20, and **tally the complaints.** Recurring complaints are the product spec for your wedge. Individual reviews are grade C; a tally of 20 is a real pattern. 3. **Their job postings** — where they're investing next, and their stack. A company hiring 5 enterprise AEs is moving upmarket and abandoning the small end. 4. **Their changelog** — velocity and direction, or its absence. 5. **Their docs/API** — real capability, unfiltered by marketing. 6. **Forums/subreddits where their users complain** — unvarnished, and where switching intent shows up. ## Step 2 — the grid Rows = the 3–6 **buying criteria the customer actually uses** (from real discovery, not invented). Columns = doing-nothing, the spreadsheet, and 2–4 named competitors. Cells = evidence + grade, not opinion. Two rules that keep this honest: - **Score them generously.** A teardown where we win every row is a fantasy that will be corrected by the market at full price. Find the rows where they genuinely beat us and write them down. - **The criteria must come from customers.** A grid built on criteria we chose because we win them is marketing, not research. ## Step 3 — find the wedge A wedge is a **segment + criterion where the incumbent is structurally unable to compete** — not merely currently worse. Structural means their business model, not their backlog. | Wedge type | Signal | Why it's structural | |---|---|---| | **Segment abandonment** | They moved upmarket (enterprise hires, "contact sales", min seats) | Their cost structure can't serve small accounts profitably | | **Price umbrella** | High price, high margin, no low tier | A cheap tier cannibalizes their core revenue — they won't | | **Onboarding gate** | Demo-only, long implementation | Self-serve requires rebuilding the org, not a feature | | **Neglect** | Stale changelog, unanswered support | Attention is elsewhere; won't return | | **Complaint cluster** | Same 1-star complaint for 2+ years | If it were cheap to fix, it'd be fixed. It's architectural | | **Geography / vertical gap** | No local presence, no vertical language | Requires local ops or domain depth they lack | | **Integration gap** | Missing the tool your segment actually uses | Roadmap reflects their ICP, not yours | **Feature parity is not a wedge.** "Same but nicer" loses to distribution every time. If the only answer is "we'd be better," there is no wedge — say so. **"Don't enter" is a legitimate and valuable output of this skill**, and cheaper than discovering it after building. ## Step 4 — the decision (mandatory output) ``` TEARDOWN: date: <> REAL ALTERNATIVES (ranked by what customers actually do) 1. ... 2. ... 3. ... PRICE ANCHOR GRID | Criterion (customer-sourced) | Nothing | Spreadsheet | Comp A | Comp B | Us | THE WEDGE Segment: Criterion: Why structural: Evidence: PRICING IMPLICATION -> business/unit-economics POSITIONING LINE -> design/web-page-build KILL CRITERIA -> thinking/decision-quality "We abandon this if by ." WHAT I COULD NOT VERIFY ``` ## Failure modes | Symptom | Cause | Fix | |---|---|---| | Grid where we win everything | Criteria chosen to flatter us | Source criteria from customers; score rivals generously | | Only named SaaS competitors listed | Missed status quo / spreadsheet | Redo step 1 — "nothing" is usually the leader | | Feature-list comparison | Treated it as a product exercise | Ask what the *buyer* decides on; mostly not features | | Conclusion "we'd do it better" | No wedge found, unwilling to say so | Say "no wedge." That's the finding | | Pricing from a review site | Not from source | Fetch their pricing page; quote verbatim + date | | Analysis rots in 3 months | No re-check trigger | Set a re-run date and a trigger (competitor raises, launches, or reprices) | ## Boundaries - **Public evidence only**: their published pages, public registries, public reviews, official APIs. - **No competitive intelligence by deception** — no fake trial signups under invented identities, no posing as a customer to extract pricing, no contacting their staff under pretext, no NDA'd or leaked material. It is a small market; this gets found out, and it converts a competitor into an enemy with a story. - A trial signup under our **real** identity to evaluate a product is fine and normal. - No login-walled scraping of review platforms; read public pages only. - Quote pricing **verbatim with a date** — paraphrased pricing is how a business builds a model on a number that was never real.