In my last blog post on market analysis, I explained why it is important to understand the market for our product. Once we know the size, the next step is to identify our competitors and analyze them. Before I go into details about Competitive Analysis, I think it is important to understand the types of competitors first. As far as I understand, there are 4 types of competitors. Refer to the table below on a quick refresher:-
So now the question becomes how do we find the competitor. Generally, we should know a few competitors for our product. Else a quick web search should do the trick. But here a few tricks:-
Trick 1- Search on Producthunt.com or betalist.com to check if there are any startups focusing on the problem you are trying to solve with your problem
Trick 2- Search on Medium/ Quora/Reddi/Twitter. I really like Advance Search feature on twitter https://twitter.com/search-advanced
Trick 3- Search for exact phrases on how you will pitch your products. For example - search "learn product management with practical examples and case studies"
Trick 4- Search for the exact problem that you are trying to solve using quotes. This is similar to trick 3 except now you are focussing on the problem instead of the solution
Trick 5- Sometimes the google search results can be very muddy. For example, if you want to search in the blog space, there are other search engines that can be used such as http://www.blogsearchengine.org/
Trick 6- If you know a competitor, go to google.com and search for " Your Competitor vs ".
Trick 7- Go to iOS app store or Android play store and see what popups and check out the number of downloads/reviews.
Once you have identified the competitors, we should place the competitors in the above 4 categories and try to focus mainly on direct competitors. I have used the above techniques to identify competitors for my blog and arranged them in the 4 categories.
Do these tricks make sense? I will try to write another post specifically on finding competitors in B2B space. Although I find that most of the tricks here can be used but I will do some more research on my end to find other cool tips as well.
How do you find your Competitors? Let me know your cool tricks.
I will cover more details about what information to look for once you have identified your competitor in Part 2 here