The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten podcast.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about competitor research and how you can do it without talking to another human being.

Understanding the competition and how they do business is a crucial business activity for any startup or business executive. Unfortunately, most startups don’t do this because it can be very complicated and time-consuming. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.

In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about a very simple and effective way to conduct research on your competition and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:39 Why this topic was chosen.

01:24 A simple way to do competitor research without talking to another human being.

02:58 Why review sites are a great way to do competitor research.

04:41 How to do competitor research with review sites.

07:13 When to do competitor research.

09:07 Who should do it and how much time to spend on it.

09:50 The benefits of competitor research.

11:10 One great thing about Hiten.

11:57  Why you should do competitor research especially if you’re resistant to it.

3 Key Points:

The key to competitor research is understanding with people think about using a competing product.

Don’t not do it.

You learn about your competitors to understand your customer.

 

[0:00:01]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

 

[0:00:05]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today on the startup chat we're going to talk about something that's near and dear to my heart, which is competitors. The specific part around competitor research and even deeper, how you can do it without ever talking to another human being.

 

[0:00:22]

Steli Efti: Ooh. All right. So this is an episode that we actually had on the docket for a little while. Hiten brought this up many weeks ago in an email conversation about a topic that we should talk about. I want to dedicate this to and Ryan, two people that help us with various things that are happening on the podcast. They've been hounding me on bringing this up so I'm super psyched to talk about this. All right, so we've talked about competitor research before, but it always involves ... some of the time we talked about how to talk to your competitors directly, to learn from them. We've talked about how to talk to your competitors' customers to learn about your competitors and your customers. Today you say we could do competitive analysis without talking to those competitors. How do we do that?

 

[0:01:19]

Hiten Shah: It's basically online reviews. If you're a B to B product, there's a bunch of sites that help you do this. Trust Radius, G2Crowd, Capterra, and there's a bunch of others. There's another one I think called Siftery, so there's a bunch of them. I forget all their names. What they do is they have reviews of basically products and people have reviewed them on there, and some companies have incentivized their customers in some way, just by asking. I don't mean really incentivize, although some do, to go to G2Crowd or whatever and review. These are review sites. You don't have to talk to anyone. You don't have to talk to a customer, you don't have to talk to the competitor themselves, you don't have to talk to anyone, and you can go read the reviews of a product on there, which is essentially the key to competitive research. What do people think about that product? That's a key part of competitive research, because then you can figure out whether to use this thing.

 

[0:02:21]

Steli Efti: All right. Let's unpack this ...

 

[0:02:23]

Hiten Shah: It's all simple.

 

[0:02:24]

Steli Efti: Well, here's the funny thing. Most of the things that we teach are the podcasts that talk about, and we're super light on this.