HOW TO PERFORM COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
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| Perform Competitor Analysis |
Today's topic is pretty interesting...competition, competitors A lot of startup founders or even established companies don't know how to think about competitors or competitors' products. I'm pretty sure you have some interesting insights there. So I think a lot of people consider their competitors from the lens of fear. They are actually constantly worried that their competitors will overtake them, that the customers might move over, that there's like a new feature that's launching from their competitors that will win in the market, and it's not really the healthiest way to think about your competitors. A better way is actually by thinking about what you can learn from your customers and learn about your customers by looking at your competitors, and it's actually a kind of less stressful way as well. And there are a lot of ways to do that starting with first of all by thinking of your competitors as just simply alternatives to your product. And these are alternatives that you can actually just learn from. So there are number of ways as I mentioned to do that. The first is by looking at competitor websites, and that's easy. It's publicly available and all that's teaching you is just how did these competitors think about their customers and a messaging as well yeah learn like you know the competitor doesn't seem to know anything about the customer that might be one learning from the messaging, but you might learn a lot because they've probably also done some research so you can look at the homepage, the pricing page, customer testimonials, feature pages... anything that they really highlight on their website that'll teach you a ton. You can also go on publicly available review sites. For example G2 crowd will teach you a lot about what customers think of competitors what they enjoy right now and what they actually want more of that they don't have, or things that you know bugs and things that crash things they don't like. You can also look at like journalists who have written about these competitors and a really great place actually to look is ProductHunt launches a lot of these companies will be launching on ProductHunt. I'm like you know the whole product or little features and you'll really get to see what people thought of that as well as how the competitor presented that feature to the world. And then there's other ways to do this that are a bit harder and take more work but they really pay off. So user testing is one of our favorites at FYI and what you can do is essentially user test a competitor's website - it can be their home page, an important page on their site, or their entire product. And by doing that you're going to hear people actually walk through a flow and tell you exactly what they think about the product, the problem it's solving. You can ask them very targeted questions, and these are unbiased people, they're people that use source from the user testing products. That's just a wealth of information. Another way that we actually also love at FYI is through surveying. So we do a lot of like NPS surveys of competitors. NPS is in that promoter score and it really teaches you about what the customer satisfaction is with the product.
I'm going to interrupt you for a minute...could you just elaborate the point a bit please. Yeah absolutely! So NPS asks two questions of the survey takers. It asks how likely would you be to recommend this product to a friend and there's a 0 through 10 scale, and then it asks you what's the most important reason for your score. What that really teaches you is How do people feel about these competitors? Are they recommending them to other people? Are they really excited about these products? Are they just kind of you know pretty neutral about them? Do they hate the products? For example in the document segment which is where FYI plays, we learned that most of the existing document apps have very low NPS scores. It's actually one of the industries with the lowest NPS scores yet these products are just gigantic, used by millions of people. So NPS will teach you a lot about your customer as well as a competitor of course. And you can even go as far as doing product market fit surveys to really understand if a product has fit in the market and what are the things that people really love and what are the things that they.. features that they want added, what are the things that they want fixed about a product and again added about a product. If I'm kind of getting this right so it's probably a three-fold approach where one you basically see all the publicly available information on review sites, website and stuff like that, two is you go into a user testing where you act as a user of your competitor and get as much information about their features and probably their positioning and stuff like that and the third thing is look at the NPS core of your competitors right so this is going to kind of give you a SWOT analysis of where you stand versus your competitors. So if I have to go by the insights that you've given, the competitor is more for me a source of information rather than a source of threat Yes, exactly. A competitor is a source of information about your customer rather than a threat to you. It's not to say you shouldn't be looking at what competitors are doing, it's just to say that you should be again learning about your customers. Maybe look at them from a different perspective...
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