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Research · Diagnose

Competitor teardown

A deep read of a single rival from public evidence: filings, pricing, job ads, reviews, product pages. Slow, unglamorous, and consistently the highest-yield research a team does.

The printable canvas and the handoff into Claude Code are part of a paid plan. See what a plan includes. It needs the Claude desktop app on this machine, and your team and the prompt library already installed in that project — we cannot see your disk, so open it there.

Stage
01 Diagnose
Works at
Business
Maturity
Early startup → Large organisation
Time
A day per competitor

What it is

A deep, evidence-based read of a single competitor built entirely from public material. Slower than profiling and much more useful, because it produces an exposure rather than a description.

Filed accounts
The only audited view of a competitor. Revenue, margin, employee count, borrowings, and the direction of all of them.
Pricing and proposition
The full cost to a customer, reconstructed including the parts not advertised. Buy it if you can.
Hiring signals
Job adverts reveal what is being built six to twelve months ahead of launch. Nearly free and almost nobody looks.
Customer evidence
Reviews, complaints, forums, case studies. Where they repeatedly fail is where they can be attacked.
Cost structure inference
What their model implies about their costs — headcount, property, sourcing, automation. Inferred, and labelled as inference.
Exposure
Where they are vulnerable and what it would take to exploit it. The output; everything above is input.
The mistake people makeA teardown that ends in a profile has done half the job. The deliverable is the exposure — the specific thing they cannot easily defend and what attacking it would cost you.
What it’s forYou need to understand one competitor properly — how they make money, what they are good at, where they are exposed.
What it’s not forYou need the shape of the whole market. Profile the set first, then tear down the one that matters.

How you run it

  1. Start with the filingsAccounts, annual reports, any regulatory submissions. This is the only part of a competitor that has been audited.
  2. Read the job adsWhat they are hiring for tells you what they are building, six to twelve months before it ships. Nobody does this and it is nearly free.
  3. Price the proposition end to endBuy it if you can. Otherwise reconstruct the full cost to a customer, including the parts they do not advertise.
  4. Mine the reviews and the complaintsWhere they fail repeatedly is where a competitor could take customers. Look for the pattern, not the outlier.
  5. Write the exposure, not just the profileA teardown that ends in a description has done half the job. Name where they are vulnerable and what it would take to exploit it.

The prompt

Two ways to run it

Run this tool in your own Claude

The short prompt starts your partner against the library on your disk. The long one carries everything with it and needs nothing installed.

🔒 Prompt locked

Everything above is free — what this tool is, what it is for, what it is not for, and how to run it as a workshop. Three tool prompts a month are free with an account; beyond three, and for the printable canvas, it is the paid part.

See plans — from £19 a month

Your playbook

It lands in the earliest stage this tool suits. Move it on the Playbook page.

You’ll need

  • The competitor named precisely, including which entity files accounts
  • Access to their public pricing and product pages
  • Any customers you share

You’ll end up with

  • How they actually make money, with numbers where filed
  • Their cost base and where it differs from yours
  • Two things they are structurally better at, and two where they are exposed

Runs well with

Business Model CanvasCapability maturity assessmentCompetitor profilingComplementary assets — who captures the value