

Feedback for simple product idea - silvia77

My roommate Chris and I are big fans of Hacker News and we publish the BASES [Startup Digest]. The Digest is a weekly email update of the top tech and entrepreneurship events happening in the Valley and around the Bay area. Check out the latest digest (and our painfully simple website) at http://thestartupdigest.com. We have been brainstorming ideas to create more simple tools that would help startups succeed. Our latest one is for a "Competitive Digest" to offer alongside the events digest. I've included an outline of the Competitive Digest below. We would love to hear what you think!<p>Problem – Companies need to keep track of their competitors but don’t have the time to do it effectively. It is important to do so because investors/customers will expect you to know what your competitors are offering and it will help you with both generating feature ideas and competitive benchmarking.<p>Our Product - The Competitive Digest will provide you with a weekly update on what your competitors have been up to, how you stack up against them in key metrics, and how you might acquire insight on what they will do next.<p>How it Works - The Digest is separated into three sections: Headlines, You vs. Them, and Competitive Content. View an example here: http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=92be899ef5a892c60b4a6cd97&#38;id=9abcf51997&#38;e=<p>The Headlines section features the most important things your competitors did last week (from articles, press releases, etc.)<p>The You vs. Them section provides you with competitive metrics to compare your website traffic, customer engagement, and media coverage.<p>The Competitive Content section provides you with links to both yours and your competitors’ tweets and company blogs. It also links you to any job postings they have and shows you any LinkedIn connections you have to their current and past employees.<p>We now have some questions for you about this problem, the product, and the offering in general. Thanks for all your input and feedback in advance. If we generate a good response we will be sure to reward you with a first demo trial of the product at a steep discount :-)<p>Is tracking your competitors a problem for your company? If so, who is this specifically a problem for?<p>Would you be willing to spend money to solve this problem?<p>How much time (if any) does this person spend per week keeping track of your competitors?<p>What do you think overall about the product offering, and what features should the Competitive Digest have from Day 1?<p>What is the hardest part of tracking your competitors, and if you could change anything about that process what would it be?<p>Do you have a budget for this problem, and who would be the person in your company in charge of this?<p>If this product cost $100 a month would you buy and use it?<p>If this product does not seem interesting to you, do you know anyone who would want something like this?<p>Thanks again,
Chris &#38; Brendan
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kevindewalt
I looked at this space a few years ago. It falls under the heading of
"competitive intelligence" in most companies. Ultimately I decided not to
pursue it, basically because I saw what rivalmap was doing and realized the
opportunity wasn't as big as I thought it would be for a similar idea. (Not
knocking them, they seem to be very sharp guys who are executing well and very
focused on learning their market)

Most likely to make any real money at this you're going to have to market to
non start-ups.

The most knowledgeable person on this topic is August Jackson, @8of12 on
Twitter. He runs the competitive intelligence podcast. Plus he's a great guy.

Kevin Dewalt Feel free to email me at kevindewalt !( _\--[[AT]]--(_ &*
kevindewalt dot com

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dwynings
<http://www.competitious.com/>

<http://www.rivalmap.com/>

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silvia77
If you want, you can reach us at:

chris [dot] mccann [at] bases [dot] stanford [dot] edu

or

brendan [at] thestartupdigest [dot] com

thanks!

