# Competitive Teardown

> Produce a structured competitive teardown of a SaaS/tech product — pricing model, feature matrix, positioning, ICP, GTM motion, and defensibility gaps. Use whenever the user asks to "research a competitor", "compare us to X", "what's [product]'s pricing", "build a battlecard", "how does [company] position itself", or wants a repeatable framework for evaluating competing products rather than a one-off summary. Also trigger when the user is deciding whether to build a feature that a competitor already ships and needs a build-vs-differentiate read.

- Skill: `zeiynz/competitive-teardown` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 2 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add zeiynz/competitive-teardown`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/zeiynz/competitive-teardown/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Marketing & Growth
- Author: zeiynz (https://skillmd.com/u/zeiynz)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/zeiynz/competitive-teardown

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# 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
1. **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)
2. **Product docs / changelog** — most reliable signal of what they're actually investing in *right now*, more honest than the marketing site
3. **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
4. **Reviews** (G2, Capterra) — mine for recurring complaints, not just star ratings; complaints are your differentiation opportunities
5. **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