Marketing & GrowthFree
Competitor Analysis With Dated Sources
Positioning, pricing and weaknesses read from what they publish and file, with a source and a capture date on every row.
River reads one competitor properly: the site, the pricing page and its history, the public reviews, the job postings, and the filings if they have to file. Every row that comes back carries what it rests on, where that was read, and the date it was read on. The grid is the easy half. The half that decides whether the document survives a meeting is the column recording which cells came from a source and which came from somebody's memory.
Two reads produce most of the findings. Their pricing page has a history, and dating the edits shows a company that raised its entry price twice and quietly removed a free tier, which is a strategy rather than a price. Their own filed disclosure, where one exists, is the only document in which a competitor writes down what could go wrong for them and has a lawyer check it first. Both are public, both are dateable, and neither appears in a blank grid.
Product marketers who own a competitor, founders walking into a bake-off, and reps who need one page before a call all want the same thing: claims they can say out loud. Take the result into a sales battlecard for that competitor, or into a page rewrite with a claim-to-proof map when the positioning itself has to move. A teardown is a dated snapshot, so put the same competitor under standing monitoring to know when it needs redoing. The marketing workspace keeps the teardown, the grid and its recheck dates beside the last competitor you read.
Where a competitor's own record is easiest to read
A competitor's pricing page is archived, and the archive can tell you when it actually changed rather than when it was captured. The Wayback CDX interface returns a content hash per capture, in a field called digest. Collapsing on that field returns only unique captures. A run of identical hashes is a page that sat still, and a new hash dates an edit. Six hundred captures reduce to the four times the page changed.
If the competitor files with the SEC, they have already written their weaknesses down. Item 105 of Regulation S-K requires a discussion of the material factors that make an investment speculative or risky, organised under headings that describe each risk. The same rule discourages generic risks and gathers any that appear at the end, under the caption General Risk Factors. So everything above that heading is specific to them, checked by their counsel, and the closest thing to an honest self-assessment you will find.
The same filings name who they think they compete with. The description of business required under Regulation S-K covers the status of development efforts for new or enhanced products and trends in market demand and competitive conditions. Read their list against your own and the gap informs you in both directions. A competitor who does not name you is one who does not lose deals to you yet, which is either an opening or a warning about which segment you actually occupy.
How it works
Name the competitor
Who they are, what you sell, and the decision this teardown has to serve.
River reads their record
The site, the pricing history, the public reviews, the postings, and any filings.
Check the provenance
Every row with its source and date, and the unsourced ones flagged at the top.
Use it, then recheck
The readout, the grid, and the date each claim needs looking at again.
What you get
- One competitor read across their site, pricing history, reviews, job postings and filings
- A source, a capture date and a staleness call on every row
- Their pricing page history dated to the edits, not to the captures
- Weaknesses quoted from what they have filed themselves, wherever a public filing exists
- The cells nobody could source marked as unsourced rather than filled in
- The internal readout, written so a rep can say it in a call
Common questions
What if the competitor is private and files nothing?
Most are. The pricing history, the public reviews, the job postings and their own pages still carry the record. The postings are the strongest signal a private company gives away, because the roles being hired describe the motion being built. The grid runs shorter and the missing rows get marked.
How is this different from a competitor analysis template?
A template is the grid. This is the filling, plus the column recording where each cell came from and when. Templates suggest sources in a paragraph and then hand over blank cells, which is how half of them end up carrying a rep's recollection as a fact. Placing the whole set against each other is a separate job, done on the positioning map.
Can I get this done before a call tomorrow?
Yes. Name them and the decision, and the readout comes back in the same session with the pricing history and the review themes in it. The deeper reads, the filings and the full grid, take a second pass. That order is deliberate, because the pricing history is usually where the surprise is.
Does it tell me their revenue or headcount?
Only where a public document says so. Estimates from traffic tools and funding databases get marked unsourced rather than carried into the grid, because an invented headcount is the row that reaches a board deck and gets corrected in public. What you get instead is the hiring, which is observable.
How long before the teardown is out of date?
Every row carries its own recheck interval, because a pricing page moves faster than a positioning statement. Pricing is monthly. Segment and product claims are quarterly. Anything read from a filing holds until the next one. Those dates are why the second teardown takes a fraction of the first.
Should reps get the whole document?
They get the readout, which is the two or three claims they can say out loud with a source behind each one. The grid belongs to whoever is making the positioning or pricing call. A rep repeating a claim nobody can source loses more ground than the objection ever cost. Claims taken from their reviewers get gated separately in the review mining analysis.
Competitor Analysis With Dated Sources
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