zeiynz Competitive Teardown
A repeatable framework for turning scattered competitor research (pricing pages, changelogs, reviews, job postings) into a decision-ready teardown — not just a summary of what a company does.
Why a framework instead of ad-hoc research
Ad-hoc competitor research tends to produce feature lists without a point of view. This skill forces four questions that actually drive decisions: who they're really selling to, how they make money, what's structurally hard to copy, and where they're vulnerable.
Workflow
Step 1: Scope the teardown
Before researching, confirm with the user (or infer from context) which of these is the goal — it changes what to prioritize:
- Battlecard (sales enablement) → weight objection-handling and pricing comparison heavily
- Build-vs-differentiate (product decision) → weight feature depth and technical moat
- Positioning research (marketing/messaging) → weight ICP, messaging, and channel strategy
- Investor/market mapping → weight funding, team size signals, and market share proxies
Step 2: Gather in this order
- Pricing page — tiers, per-seat vs. usage-based, what's gated behind "Contact Sales" (that gate itself is a signal of ICP — enterprise-only features hide there)
- Product docs / changelog — most reliable signal of what they're actually investing in right now, more honest than the marketing site
- Job postings (via web search on "[company] careers") — engineering job posts reveal tech stack and what they're building next; GTM job posts reveal which segment they're expanding into
- Reviews (G2, Capterra) — mine for recurring complaints, not just star ratings; complaints are your differentiation opportunities
- Recent news/funding — runway and strategic pressure shape how aggressively they'll respond to competition
Step 3: Structure the output using the standard teardown template
See references/teardown-template.md for the full section-by-section template. Core sections:
- One-paragraph thesis (what they are, in one sentence a prospect would use)
- Pricing & packaging breakdown
- Feature matrix (only include rows that are actually differentiating — a matrix of 40 checkmarks is noise)
- ICP & positioning read
- Strengths that are structurally defensible vs. strengths that are just "shipped first"
- Vulnerabilities / wedge opportunities
- Recommendation (specific to the scope chosen in Step 1)
Step 4: Separate fact from inference
Explicitly label which claims are sourced (with links) vs. inferred (e.g., "pricing page doesn't list enterprise pricing → likely $50K+ ACV based on comparable gated-pricing SaaS patterns"). Decision-makers need to know which parts of the teardown to trust vs. verify further.
Anti-patterns to avoid
- Don't pad the feature matrix to look thorough — a 6-row matrix of things that matter beats a 30-row matrix of things that don't
- Don't present competitor marketing copy as fact — a "leading platform" claim on their homepage is a claim, not a finding
- Don't skip the vulnerability section — a teardown without a wedge is just a book report
Reference
references/teardown-template.md— full markdown template with section prompts