Knowing your competition is a very important part of business and I'm curious to get your input as to how you figure out who your direct and indirect competition is.<p>I recently needed to do a specific task and while there were a couple of solutions out there, I really disliked their implementations (basically they were too difficult to use). I think I can do a much better job in implementing the idea (which I am working on now), but I'd really like to have a better picture of who's out there doing the same thing.<p>Do you have any suggestions for finding potential competitors aside from just mindlessly Googling words and phrases?<p>Thanks in advance!
I usually gather information through those sites/techniques:<p>- <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com</a><p>- Google search "COMPANY alternative"<p>- Twitter search "COMPANY"<p>* Where COMPANY is either the company/product name.
If they have a URL an are somewhat popular, I use my website: <a href="http://www.moreofit.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.moreofit.com</a> to find similar services and companies. By noting the tags you can gain tremendous insight into the breadth and depth of the market space. By altering the sort popularity, you can quickly note who's doing well.
<i>how you figure out who your direct and indirect competition is</i><p>I talk to my customers. They're very good at telling me "I was using X until I discovered Tarsnap" and (far less often) "I'm not going to be using Tarsnap any more because I'm switching to X".
I just found this blog posting that has a list of tools that you can use to analyze your competitors when you find them:<p><a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic" rel="nofollow">http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic</a>
One trick I found for researching competitors (once you know they're competitors):
- Do a linkedin search for the competitive company
- Pull the names of the CTO and senior technical staff
- Do a patent search based on those names