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Paying attention to competitors

How often do you check out your competitors? And how deeply?

If you are working at any kind of business, you need to know what the market looks like. This includes the services offered, new features or capabilities and pricing. Pricing is very important, and you should try to know both the public pricing and the real pricing. The latter is tough and part of why secret shoppers are a thing; your customers who have talked to competitors but chose you might also be able to help.

If you work in devtools, you also need to know about how competitors are actually used:

  • integration time
  • migration complexity
  • long term ROI/issues

How can you find out about this? You can:

  • read their website
  • read their code (if they expose it)
  • read their forums or slack channel
  • subscribe to their newsletter
  • set up a google alert for them
  • use the tool

However, all of these have flaws.

A marketing website can be tough to extract information from. And technical documentation can lie^H^H^H^H be inaccurate or out of date.

Reading code to understand it is helpful if you are zooming in on specific feature, but most users of whatever the tool is are going to be interested in solving a problem, not the intricacies of how a problem is solved. Code isn’t always available or in a language you know, either.

Reading feedback and questions from a community around a product can be fruitful, but you will only see problems, because happy users rarely post. It is a good way to find out about longer term challenges, though. If you do this and reply to messages, you should 100% never shill your product. That’s like going into a Wal-mart in a Target shirt and walking up to customers and trying to get them to leave with you. Not a good look.

Getting a newsletter keeps you on top of their messaging. However, understand that a newsletter will show them in the best light.

Setting up a google alert can be helpful in getting you an understanding not just of what they are saying about themselves, but what the wider internet is saying. However, there can be a a lot of garbage in there. If the competitor is a public company, you’ll get more stock tips than technical evaluation.

I think the last choice, using the tool to solve a problem, is the highest effort, but will teach you the most. You’ll have to spend money and time.

Since you aren’t using their software in a production context, you won’t get a full picture, but you’ll have an idea of the integration joy and pain that their users will feel. You should ideally do the integration on a cadence so that you keep up with changes and features.

Great. You should learn about the competition.

But how do you figure out how your competitors are? That’s what I’ll cover soon.