Startup Bootcamp, Part 6: Stalk your competitors
Ever “stumble upon” the Facebook profile of the person you’re meeting later for coffee? Search for your boss’ Zillow listing?
See? You’ve been preparing to stalk your competition your whole life and you didn’t even know it. Dig a little deeper to see how worthy these adversaries are and how they might impact you:
Judgment Criteria
Quantitative
Growth: How are they growing their business? Sticky (retaining customers, not acquiring new ones), Viral (fueled by customer referrals, or Paid (growth through advertising)? Is it a rapid or slow growth?
Size: Number of employees and customers. You can learn a lot by stalking competitor websites. Do they have photos of their staff? Pic of the building? It’s more of an educated guess at this point.
Funding and Burn: Bootstrapped? VC-backed? Well-funded? Do they have offices and staff and a lot of inventory? Use these facts to get a rough idea of how they’re funded.
Qualitative
Customer Sentiment: What are people saying about them?
Marketing Activity: Using marketing as a growth engine? What’s the brand presence? What’s their tone of voice? Is their marketing a differentiator?
Professionalism: Is their presence polished, or have a more slapped together, fly-by-night feel?
Tools for Stalking
www.semrush.com: Provides organic and paid search (top keyword competitors), advertising research (spend/month, their creative), shows backlinks.
www.spyfu.com: See where your competitors have shown up on Google, every keyword bought on Google Adwords, every organic rank and every ad variation in the last 11 years.
www.angel.co: What your competitors are publishing to attract investors and employees.
www.crunchbase.com: See if your competitors are funded and when their funding rounds were.
www.mention.co/visualping.io: Real-time media monitoring of competitors to check sentiment.
Now you can build a narrative that describes how you’ll position your idea relative to the rest of the market.
Is your competitive landscape saturated with other worthy adversaries? While that indicates there’s a market for your idea, it also means you must differentiate your concept so people choose your product over the competition’s. Eye wear category disruptor Warby Parker entered a heavily saturated market, but differentiated their offering by providing glasses at a dramatically lower price, facilitating an “at-home” try-on process and distributing online versus brick and mortar. How will your idea stand out?
Conversely, is your idea unique to the market and you don’t have any competitors? That means you can’t gauge market interest until you test it. Is your unique idea adjacent to a market that has known demand? How can you refine your idea so you sit in that sweet spot where you have a unique concept with indicators of market interest?
For Primal Post, there are countless jerky companies, subscription services aren’t new and people can easily purchase a protein bar over a bag of jerky. What we plan to do is take known, proven tactics, and target them to very specific audiences that attacks a small piece of the pie. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to eat, too.