Think You Know Your Competitors? You Probably Don’t

Many think of themselves as “strategic”. But are making considered decisions, as if they’re blindfolded in a casino. Real strategy starts with one question nobody asks:

“What do we really know about the competition?”

Here’s why competitive intelligence is the only thing separating planned good moves from those expensive guesses.

The $4 Million Decision Made in Complete Darkness
A SaaS company burned through $4 million in 2022, building a feature that its competitor had already tried and abandoned.

They spent nine months in development. Hired a team of six engineers. Built custom infrastructure and launched with a full marketing push.

Three customers used it. None paid extra for it.

Here’s the part that should make their then-investors angry: Their competitor had detailed blog posts explaining why they killed the same feature eighteen months earlier. The data was public. The lessons were free.

Nobody looked.

The CEO said, “We thought we knew our market. Turns out we knew our product and nothing else.”

That’s the gap. That’s where companies die.

The Lie Everyone Believes
Walk into most strategy meetings, and you’ll hear the same confident statements:

“We know our competitors.”

“We’re better than them.”

“They just win on price.”

“We’re too small to need formal competitive intelligence.”

You may have heard versions of these yourself. They’re all wrong.

You don’t know your competitors. You know the version of them you saw six months ago when you last checked their website. And you may know the sales pitch their rep gave your customer. You know what your team thinks they do.

You don’t know what they’re building right now. And you don’t know where they’re investing. And you don’t know what customers actually say about them when your team isn’t in the room.

That ignorance costs companies millions every year in bad product decisions, ineffective positioning, and missed opportunities.

What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive intelligence isn’t spying. It’s not hiring private investigators or stealing documents.

It’s respecting the game enough to study the players.

Ben Gilad, who founded the Academy of Competitive Intelligence, calls it “competitive insight”—not data points, but understanding. The kind that lets you make moves nobody else sees because you understand what everyone else is doing.

Most companies collect competitive data. They track product releases, monitor pricing, and capture screenshots of competitor websites. You can even spend a lot of money convincing yourself that the competitive intelligence box is ticked because you invested in a platform.

That’s surveillance, not intelligence.

Intelligence is connecting dots. It’s seeing that three competitors have just hired VPs of Enterprise Sales, and that means the market is shifting upmarket. It’s noticing job postings reveal what your competitor is building six months before they announce it.

And it’s pattern recognition that turns information into action.

The Focus Strategy That Actually Works
Look at the competitive landscape, and you will see product sprawl everywhere. Everyone is trying to be everything to everyone. What if you chose the opposite: own one category so completely that customers don’t even consider alternatives.

Michael Porter calls this a focus strategy. It’s understanding what competitors are doing and choosing a different path.

In a market full of SaaS platforms offering everything, become the specialist that owns their category. Less Rippling and more MHR, for instance.

A decision that requires studying the competition deeply enough to spot the gap nobody else was exploiting.

Why Most Strategy Is Just Expensive Guessing
We consult on Series A and B rounds for startups. The pattern is consistent and depressing.

Founders pitch both massive TAM and niche specialisation in the same deck. They claim to be “the Salesforce of X” and “purpose-built for X vertical.”

Contradictions exist because they arn’t doing competitive intelligence. No one’s asking:

What positioning is already crowded?
What gaps really exist?
Where can we win?
Instead, they’re guessing. Building what they think customers want without checking who else has tried this and failed.

We worked with a marketing automation company in 2023. They wanted to add social media management features. “Our customers are asking for it,” they said. They asked us to confirm this.

Our work showed that the six major players already dominate social media management. Two had tried to expand from marketing automation into social, but retreated after 12 months because integration complexity killed adoption.

The data was public. It was free to see. Nobody looked.

They redirected their roadmap toward workflow automation, where competition was lighter. The feature launched six months later and drove 30% of new enterprise deals.

That change of direction happened because they were open enough to do competitive intelligence to prove or disprove their thinking. We studied what competitors tried, what worked, what failed, and where opportunities existed.

The Blindspots That Kill Companies
Every company has competitive blind spots. The question is whether you’re actively looking for them or ignoring them until they destroy you.

Again, we worked with a project management software company around 2023. They believed their main competitor was Asana. They obsessed over Asana’s features, pricing, and positioning.

Meanwhile, Notion was quietly eating their lunch from an adjacent category. Notion wasn’t even on their competitive radar because “they’re a note-taking app, not project management.”

Customers didn’t care about categories. They cared about solving their workflow problems. Notion’s flexibility solved those problems better than rigid project management tools.

That’s a blind spot. Not seeing threats because they don’t fit your mental model of who you compete with.

Real competitive intelligence forces you to expand your horizons. It asks:

Who else solves the same customer problem?

Who could solve it tomorrow?

Who’s building capabilities that overlap with yours, even if they’re in a different category?

The Pattern Recognition
The best strategists aren’t visionaries. They aren’t futurists with great beards and cool glasses. They’re pattern recognisers. And of course, pattern rejectors.

They see that competitor hiring patterns that predicts future product launches.

They notice when a few competitors move in the same direction and ask why.

And they track which features customers mention in reviews and are getting ignored.

Run a monthly competitive intelligence scan to track:

Competitor job postings.
What roles are they hiring? Where are they investing?
Product changelogs and release notes.
What are they building?
What are they killing?
Customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and Reddit. What are customers actually saying when sales teams aren’t listening?
LinkedIn activity from their executives and employees. What are they talking about? What problems are they focused on?
Funding announcements and financial news.
Where’s money flowing? What’s getting starved?
Every time you do this, compile three insights. Not fifty data points. Three things that matter.

Sometimes it’s “Competitor X just hired their third VP of Sales this year—they’re struggling with go-to-market execution.”

It could be “Four customers mentioned in reviews that they switched from Competitor Y because of poor support response times—there’s an opportunity in customer experience differentiation.”

Or “Two competitors just launched the same feature we were planning—we need to find a different angle.”

These insights drive strategy. They prevent bad decisions. And they surface opportunities before they become obvious to everyone else.

The Moves That Look Like Genius
When Uber started dynamic pricing, people called it a brilliant innovation.

It wasn’t innovation. It was competitive intelligence applied from outside the industry.

Airlines had been doing dynamic pricing for decades. Hotels did it. Events did it. The model was proven. Uber just launched ride-sharing before their competitors did.

That’s not genius. That’s studying adjacent markets, identifying what works, and applying it before everyone else figures it out.

Most breakthrough strategies aren’t breakthroughs. They’re smart applications of competitive intelligence from other industries, markets, or time periods.

Netflix didn’t invent streaming. They studied how Blockbuster failed and built the opposite business model. They watched cable companies bundle content and did the same thing digitally.

Amazon didn’t invent e-commerce. They studied mail-

order catalogues, retail logistics, and Walmart’s distribution strategies. They imported retail intelligence into the digital world.

The pattern is consistent. Study what works elsewhere. Apply it where competitors haven’t figured it out yet. Execute faster.

Why Internal BS Kills More Companies Than Competition
Most companies don’t fail because competitors beat them. They fail because they lied to themselves about their competitive position.

We worked with a B2B SaaS company that claimed “enterprise-ready” positioning while having zero enterprise customers. Their competitor analysis showed they were “better” across every dimension.

The reality was that they’d never used their competitors’ products. They were comparing their own marketing claims to competitors’ claims.

When we did real competitive intelligence. Actual product testing, customer interviews, and win-loss analysis—the truth was a wake-up call.

Their product was easier to use but lacked security features enterprises required. Their support was faster, but only during US business hours. And their pricing looked competitive until you added the features enterprises really needed.

Their competitors were winning because they actually delivered what enterprises needed.

Real competitive intelligence destroys the comfortable stories we tell ourselves. It forces honesty about where you actually stand.

That’s uncomfortable. It’s also essential.

The Small Moves That Builds Positioning
Strategy doesn’t require McKinsey consultants and 200-slide decks.

It requires small, intentional moves based on what the market is already showing you.

Constantly learning what customers want, what margins work, and what they can execute consistently.

That’s competitive intelligence as practice, not theory.

Build something small. Ship it. See how customers respond compared to alternatives. Learn. Adjust. Build the next thing.

Each cycle, you’re gathering competitive intelligence. You’re learning what customers value that competitors aren’t delivering. You’re finding gaps in execution, positioning, or experience.

Over time, these small moves compound into positioning that’s nearly impossible to disrupt.

What Strategy Actually Looks Like
Strategy isn’t about those vision statements and your five-year plans.

It’s about asking better questions:

What are our competitors doing that we should ignore?
What are customers complaining about that nobody’s (including us) fixing?
What trends can we see that haven’t yet hit our market?
Where are competitors investing that’s leaving other areas undefended?
What worked in adjacent markets that we could adapt?
These questions only get answered through disciplined competitive intelligence.

Not guessing. Not assuming. And not trusting your gut about what competitors are doing.

Actually looking. Actually tracking. And by analysing.

The Practice That Separates Winners From Pretenders
Most companies treat competitive intelligence as a project. Something you do once during strategy planning. A consultant deliverable. Or a pre-pricing session. A metaphorical binder that sits on a shelf.

With active competitive intelligence, you spot trends earlier. You see threats before they mature. You find opportunities while competitors are still guessing.

And you stop reacting to market moves and start anticipating them.

That’s the difference between strategy theatre and actual strategy.

What to Do Tomorrow
Stop pretending you understand your competitive landscape.

Select your top three competitors
Use their products
Read their customer reviews
Check their job postings
Then study their pricing
Then ask yourself:

What do they know that we don’t?
What are they building that we’re ignoring?
And what are customers saying about them that contradicts our assumptions?
Write down three insights. (Not fifty data points). Three things that change how you think about your market position.

Then do it again next week. And the week after.

That’s how you stop guessing and start knowing.

And it’s how you turn strategy from those PowerPoint slides into decisions that have a better chance of winning.

https://www.octopusintelligence.com/think-you-know-your-competitors-you-probably-dont/