Ask HN: What tools do you use to discover competitors?
Yeah yeah I know, don't be too obsessed with competition but also, when I have some new dumb idea I first buy the domain and then... I always want to get a sense of the competative landscape and market.
What tools do you use to quickly find most competitors to a given idea?
Seems like it could be a good application of semantic search.
Years ago, before BERT and all that, I worked on a search engine for patents where you could give it a paragraph describing an invention and it would use a combination of document embeddings and probability-based full text search to find matching patent and non-patent literature.
Today's embeddings (see SBERT) are much better than what we had back then and I bet if you had a database of company descriptions, maybe articles about them, you could write a paragraph about your business and find competitors.
Review aggregation websites like G2 and Trustpilot.
SEO/Advertisement research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.
A simple search for "something alternative" on Google search.
Yeah for sure! At least I try to do this. It's that framing that I use when starting the competative search. Still, too often and well after I've launched, I find myself discovering significant competitors I wish I'd known about. Also sometimes it's hard to know what keywords customers will end up using -- which is often the source of my missing competitors I end up caring about.
Thanks for this. I've tried all the deep research systems; in every case I've tried they seem to find at most 20% of what I end up discovering is a more complete set of competitors. ChatGPT get's you a pretty obvious first 10%. Both are useful, but I've never seem them produce anything near a full picture.
They don’t if it’s a genetic search. What worked for me was searching for potential competitors using perplexity, then after identify the ones I feel closer, I would do a deep research about each one using ChatGPT. This worked pretty well as I had all the info I needed about each competitor including the GTM and what SEO clusters and topics they target.
Years ago, before BERT and all that, I worked on a search engine for patents where you could give it a paragraph describing an invention and it would use a combination of document embeddings and probability-based full text search to find matching patent and non-patent literature.
Today's embeddings (see SBERT) are much better than what we had back then and I bet if you had a database of company descriptions, maybe articles about them, you could write a paragraph about your business and find competitors.
https://www.g2.com/
https://www.trustpilot.com/
https://ahrefs.com/blog/competitive-analysis-guide/
- ChatGPT and Perplexity DeepResearch.
There are no competitors for ideas.
Only for execution.
Good luck.