Competitive market intelligence can be a real accelerator for you, personally, as well as for your startup.
To say the life of a founder is busy is a vast understatement. Building a product or service at the same time you’re trying to sell it, build a team, develop a brand and more … and now you need to do competitive intelligence? Most founders find it hard to justify the time, but it’s critical to work this into your daily routine.
The right competitive intelligence and market research will help you:
- have the right perspective to aid in funding or partnership conversations;
- keep your team aligned for optimal decision making; and
- build your personal brand and your company’s brand.
Competitive market intelligence does not need to be time consuming, hard or complex, which is why we’ve built our Fuel platform.
Why is Competitive Intelligence Important?
Competitive intelligence and market research helps you be the most prepared person in the room, no matter the conversation. Whether a partnership, fundraising or other strategic conversation, constantly delivering value, having good market insight and being knowledgeable about your competitors and comparators are great ways to build credibility over time. Companies and markets are always changing and evolving, and the only way to continue to be the most prepared person is to be actively listening.
Knowing your competitors and your market cold isn’t sufficient, however. Your company needs to be aligned with your learnings, and competitive market intelligence can help.
In my career at Dyn, I led product management for our email delivery product. I loved being engrossed in the market, learning the competitive landscape, exploring partner opportunities and more. Where I can honestly say I lacked was consistently aligning my team and the broader company on those things. With Fuel, you can create watchlists of specific companies and share them with your internal team members, so you can all be on the same page.
If you asked everyone in your company who your competitors are, or where your best strategic partnership opportunities are, do you think they would all have the same answer? With an aligned view, driven by your competitive market intelligence, your company can take a market-in perspective and bring a more balanced approach to your customers.
Finger on the Pulse
Keeping up with the news — what the players in your market are doing and saying — is a crucial part of competitive intelligence and market research. But when your space is full of other early-stage companies that don’t get much mainstream media coverage, how can you keep up?
Fuel makes it easy to listen to markets — even for busy entrepreneurs. Fuel News curates the best owned content from early-stage companies across multiple areas of technology, enabling you to get quick insights on a market as a whole. It even summarizes articles, extracts the three key points and delivers content directly to your inbox, making it as frictionless as possible for you to get the news you need.
You can also use this content to develop your own story, do you agree with these perspectives? Have a different twist on them? Share the articles, and your own takes to continue to grow and amplify your brand.
Larger Market Research
It’s important for competitive market intelligence to be digestible so you can make it part of your routine. But sometimes research is a larger effort.
When the time comes to do a bigger piece of research, like for a pitch deck, investment rationale or strategic offsite, Fuel also provides the key elements to support your efforts, including:
- funding trends or the latest funding events in a market;
- identifying similar companies in the same market; and
- diving deep on specific companies to understand their differentiation.
I once heard someone say that if you want to have more ideas, you need to increase the randomness in your life. Essentially, with more experiences, you’ll be able to apply forms of your experiences in different ways and make better decisions.
Making competitive intelligence and market research a core part of your business growth strategy is the way to increase the experiences you have within your market.
