Ask HN: What tools do you use to discover competitors?

4•flippyhead•8mo ago

Yeah yeah I know, don't be too obsessed with competition but also, when I have some new dumb idea I first buy the domain and then... I always want to get a sense of the competative landscape and market.

What tools do you use to quickly find most competitors to a given idea?

Comments

uticus•8mo ago

Follow the customers. Hopefully you have thought about customer desires etc before production - that provides a starting point.

flippyhead•8mo ago

Yeah for sure! At least I try to do this. It's that framing that I use when starting the competative search. Still, too often and well after I've launched, I find myself discovering significant competitors I wish I'd known about. Also sometimes it's hard to know what keywords customers will end up using -- which is often the source of my missing competitors I end up caring about.

nimzoLarsen•8mo ago

Searching on Reddit, twitter, product hunt

Oras•8mo ago

- SpyFu

- ChatGPT and Perplexity DeepResearch.

flippyhead•8mo ago

Thanks for this. I've tried all the deep research systems; in every case I've tried they seem to find at most 20% of what I end up discovering is a more complete set of competitors. ChatGPT get's you a pretty obvious first 10%. Both are useful, but I've never seem them produce anything near a full picture.

Oras•8mo ago

They don’t if it’s a genetic search. What worked for me was searching for potential competitors using perplexity, then after identify the ones I feel closer, I would do a deep research about each one using ChatGPT. This worked pretty well as I had all the info I needed about each competitor including the GTM and what SEO clusters and topics they target.

PaulHoule•8mo ago

Seems like it could be a good application of semantic search.

Years ago, before BERT and all that, I worked on a search engine for patents where you could give it a paragraph describing an invention and it would use a combination of document embeddings and probability-based full text search to find matching patent and non-patent literature.

Today's embeddings (see SBERT) are much better than what we had back then and I bet if you had a database of company descriptions, maybe articles about them, you could write a paragraph about your business and find competitors.

brudgers•8mo ago

Talking to your customers?

There are no competitors for ideas.

Only for execution.

Good luck.

constantinum•8mo ago

Review aggregation websites like G2 and Trustpilot. SEO/Advertisement research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. A simple search for "something alternative" on Google search.

https://www.g2.com/

https://www.trustpilot.com/

https://ahrefs.com/blog/competitive-analysis-guide/

flippyhead•8mo ago

I keep expecting to find something that does this but never have so I tried my hand at building one https://already.dev

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