Competitor analysis in 5 steps, on no budget

Search the way your customers search: type their problem into Google, not your product name. Add industry directories, review sites, app stores and LinkedIn. Aim for 15 to 25 names, unfiltered. Sorting comes later.

Result: a raw list. Filtering this early is how you miss the providers customers actually consider.

Direct competitors solve the same problem the same way. Indirect ones solve it differently (a tax adviser competes with tax software). The third group is almost always forgotten: the customer's own workaround, usually a spreadsheet, a notepad or simply doing nothing.

Result: 5 to 8 providers you genuinely examine, plus one deliberately named workaround.

Build a table, one row per provider, and fill the same columns for all of them (see the grid below). Comparability comes from uniformity, not from depth. Note the source and date for every entry, otherwise the analysis is worthless in six months.

Result: a table where you compare columns instead of reading prose.

A provider's website says what they promise. The reviews say what they deliver. Read the three-star reviews on purpose: five stars are often polished, one star is often an outlier, three stars name real weaknesses. The same goes for complaints in forums and professional groups.

Result: three to five recurring complaints. Those are the gaps you can move into.

The sentence reads: for [target group] we are the only solution that [benefit], because [reason]. It has to survive the table. If two competitors could say the same sentence, it is not a position but a description.

Result: one statement you reuse in ads, on the website and in sales conversations.