Competitor Research

competitor-research

When you activate

• Before naming a product (this is phase 1 of name-product — it seeds themes and the collision baseline).
• Before positioning, pricing, or GTM.
• Whenever the user asks "who else does this", "competitors", "landscape", "who are we up against".

What you produce

1. A competitor table — direct + adjacent + incumbents.
2. A naming-conventions read — what patterns the category uses (to fit or to break).
3. The white-space — positioning angles nobody owns.
4. A persisted file: products/<slug>/competitors.md (create/update, dedupe) so the picture compounds across sessions.

Protocol

1. Frame. One line: what the product does · its category · its ICP. (Pull from the product config / positioning brief if it exists.)
2. Find, three rings (WebSearch, a few angles each):
   • Direct — same job-to-be-done for the same user.
   • Adjacent — overlapping capability or audience (these still cause name collisions).
   • Incumbents — the big, generic players everyone compares against.
3. For each competitor, capture: name · URL · one-line what-they-do · positioning angle · naming pattern (coined? descriptive? founder-name? compound? suffix?).
4. Synthesize:
   • Naming conventions in the space — and whether to conform (legibility) or contrast (distinctiveness).
   • Positioning white-space — angles/wording nobody owns.
   • The collision baseline — the exact names/roots a new name must avoid (hand this to name-clearance).
5. Persist. Write/merge products/<slug>/competitors.md with a dated section. Dedupe against prior entries; note what's new.
6. Machine-readable twin (added for market-xray, 2026-08-16). Also write/refresh products/<slug>/research/competitors.csv — columns name,url,type,notes (type: direct/adjacent) — the same deduped set. market-xray's stage 2 reads it to build targets.json after the operator prunes; standalone runs of this skill keep it current too.

Output format

Markdown: a competitor table, then three short lists — naming patterns, white-space, names/roots to avoid. Keep it scannable. Cite URLs.

Notes

• This is a living asset — each run appends and refines, so coverage improves over time.
• Run it before generating names: it both inspires themes and defines what must be cleared.