Ask HN: What tools do you use to discover competitors? | Hacker News Reader

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

4 pointsflippyhead10 comments

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?

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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/

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.

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

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

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.

Searching on Reddit, twitter, product hunt

- SpyFu

- ChatGPT and Perplexity DeepResearch.

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.

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.

Talking to your customers?

There are no competitors for ideas.

Only for execution.

Good luck.

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