Competitor Teardown Skill

This skill produces a complete competitive analysis document — structured for use in strategy decks, investor materials, sales enablement, or product planning sessions.

Required Inputs

Ask the user for these if not provided:

• Your product (name + one-line description)
• Competitors to analyse (list 2–5 names; if not provided, ask)
• Analysis depth (quick overview / detailed teardown)
• Primary use case for this analysis (e.g. sales enablement, investor deck, internal strategy, product planning)

Deeper Materials

• references/intel-sourcing-guide.md — where competitive facts come from (four source tiers), which source to use per teardown section, the [verified]/[reported]/[assumed] confidence labels, and the ethics line. Apply its labelling to every substantive claim in the output.
• templates/teardown-skeleton.md — a fill-in teardown with the confidence labels and a verification queue built in. Offer it when the user wants to gather the intel themselves.

Output Structure

1. Competitive Landscape Overview

One paragraph summarising the market dynamic: who the key players are, how the market is segmented, and where the white space sits. Keep this under 150 words — it's the exec summary.

2. Positioning Map

Describe a 2x2 positioning map in text form (since you can't render images):

• Define the two axes relevant to this market (e.g. "Ease of Use vs. Depth of Features" or "Price vs. Enterprise Readiness")
• Place each competitor in one quadrant with a one-sentence rationale
• Place the user's product and highlight the strategic implication

3. Feature Comparison Table

Use ✅ (has it), ❌ (doesn't have it), 🟡 (partial/limited). Add a "Strategic Notes" column for features where the difference is a significant selling point or risk.

Include 10–15 rows. If user hasn't provided feature details, note which cells need to be verified.

4. Messaging Analysis

For each competitor, analyse their public-facing messaging (website headline, tagline, primary value prop):

[Competitor Name]

• Their primary claim: [what they say they do]
• Target audience signal: [who they seem to be targeting based on language/imagery]
• Emotional hook: [fear / aspiration / authority / speed / simplicity]
• Gap or weakness in their messaging: [what they don't address that your product could own]

5. SWOT Summary

Produce a clean SWOT for the user's product in the context of this competitive landscape:

• Strengths: [2–3 genuine differentiators]
• Weaknesses: [2–3 honest gaps or vulnerabilities]
• Opportunities: [2–3 market gaps or competitor weaknesses to exploit]
• Threats: [2–3 competitor moves or market shifts to watch]

6. Strategic Recommendations

3–5 actionable recommendations based on the analysis. Frame each as: "Given [observation], [your product] should [action] to [outcome]."

Scoring Rubric (0–40)

Score any output of this skill before handing it over; 32+ is ship-quality.

Quality Checks

• Axes on positioning map are meaningful and specific to this market
• Feature table includes strategic notes on key differentiators
• Messaging analysis covers all named competitors
• SWOT is honest — Weaknesses and Threats should not be softened
• Recommendations are specific and actionable, not generic strategy advice

Anti-Patterns

• Do not mark feature presence as equivalent across competitors without noting quality differences — both products may have "reporting" while one's is meaningfully better
• Do not position the user's product in the most favourable quadrant without justification — a self-serving positioning map that ignores real competitive pressure provides no strategic value
• Do not soften Weaknesses or Threats in the SWOT — a SWOT that only celebrates strengths is a marketing document, not a strategy tool
• Do not include unverifiable claims about competitor capabilities without flagging them as assumptions — presenting rumours as facts damages analytical credibility

Example Trigger Phrases

• "Do a competitor analysis of [Product] vs [Competitor A] and [Competitor B]"
• "Tear down [Competitor]'s positioning"
• "Give me a competitive landscape for [market]"
• "Build a SWOT for our product against [competitor]"

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Supporting file: references/intel-sourcing-guide.md

Sourcing Competitive Intelligence

A teardown is only as credible as its sources. This guide ranks where competitive facts come from, what each source is good for, and how to label confidence so the reader knows fact from inference.

Source tiers

Tier 1 — the competitor's own words (highest confidence)

• Pricing page, docs, changelog/release notes, API reference — capabilities they ship, not just claim
• Job postings — roadmap leakage: hiring "Streaming Infrastructure Lead" says more than a press release
• Earnings calls / investor letters (public cos) — where they're told to say the strategy out loud
• Status pages and rate-limit docs — honest signals of scale and architecture

Tier 2 — verified observation

• A trial/demo account you actually drove — the only reliable source for quality judgements (a ✅ in a feature table says nothing about whether it's good)
• Screenshots/recordings from real usage, docs examples, template galleries
• Public compliance artifacts (SOC 2 listings, DPAs, subprocessor lists) — enterprise-readiness ground truth

Tier 3 — third-party signal (directional, needs corroboration)

• Review sites (G2, Capterra) — read the 2-3 star reviews; 5s and 1s are noise. Recurring complaints = durable weaknesses
• Community chatter (Reddit, HN, Discord) — great for "what users actually hit", biased toward the annoyed
• Traffic/hiring analytics tools, app-store rank — trend, not level
• Press coverage — treat as the competitor's messaging with a byline

Tier 4 — hearsay (flag or drop)

• "A customer told our sales rep…", analyst rumours, unattributed roadmap claims. Usable only as questions to verify, labelled as such.

Per-section sourcing

Confidence labelling

Mark every substantive claim in the teardown with one of:

• [verified] — Tier 1-2, checked directly, dated
• [reported] — Tier 3, single-source; say the source
• [assumed] — inference or hearsay; say what would verify it

The feature table gets the same discipline: a cell may be ✅ [verified 2026-06] or 🟡 [reported — G2 reviews]. Undated competitive facts rot: anything older than ~2 quarters is a to-reverify item.

Ethics line

Use only public and legitimately-accessed information: no misrepresenting identity to obtain demos, no soliciting confidential material from a competitor's customers or ex-employees under NDA, no scraping behind auth walls against terms. Beyond ethics, tainted intel is unusable in the deck it was destined for.

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Supporting file: references/worked-example.md

Worked Example — Competitor Teardown Skill

The brief

Northray makes a screenless recovery wearable (band + app, €249 hardware + €11.99/month) for serious amateur endurance athletes — 88,000 subscribers, €13.1M ARR, monthly churn 5.8%. Ahead of 2027 planning and a Series B narrative, the head of product commissions a detailed teardown of three competitors: Pulsefirn (the direct band-plus-subscription rival, fresh off an $80M raise), Veloq (a mass-market smartwatch maker whose Watch S now bundles free recovery scores), and Restwell (a software-only sleep app at €5.99/month). Primary use: internal strategy; secondary: investor deck. A known sensitivity: Northray's founder has said publicly and repeatedly that the product will "never gamify recovery" — and the churn data points somewhere awkward. Sources: competitor pricing/docs pages and trial accounts (captured June 2026), app-store data, and review-site synthesis; confidence labels applied throughout.

The output

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Competitive Teardown: Northray vs Pulsefirn, Veloq, Restwell

Prepared for: 2027 strategy planning (secondary: Series B materials) | Intel captured: June 2026 — re-verify after two quarters

1. Competitive Landscape Overview

The recovery-tracking market is splitting into three camps: dedicated subscription wearables (Northray, Pulsefirn) selling depth and coaching to committed athletes; general-purpose smartwatches (Veloq) bundling "good-enough" recovery scores for free into hardware people already own; and software-only sleep/recovery apps (Restwell) harvesting the price-sensitive bottom of the market. The strategic pressure is asymmetric: Pulsefirn competes with us for the same 200k–400k serious-athlete niche in Europe, while Veloq erodes the category's willingness to pay a monthly fee at all. White space sits in prescriptive, sport-specific training guidance — everyone measures recovery; nobody yet closes the loop into "here is exactly what today's session should be", trusted enough that a coach would endorse it.

2. Positioning Map

Axes: X — audience focus: casual wellness ↔ competitive performance. Y — product depth: raw metrics ↔ prescriptive guidance. Chosen because price maps poorly here (Veloq's "free" is a bundling artefact), and these two axes are where buying decisions actually happen [assumed — validated against win/loss notes, n=31 exit interviews].

• Veloq Watch S — casual / raw metrics: recovery score is one number with a colour, no methodology exposed, aimed at the general fitness user [verified 2026-06 — trial device].
• Restwell — casual / semi-prescriptive: strong sleep-behaviour nudges, but no training-load side at all; it prescribes bedtime, not workouts [verified 2026-06 — trial account].
• Pulsefirn — competitive / increasingly prescriptive: shipped "Adaptive Training Plans" in April 2026 [verified — changelog]; execution quality is mixed per recurring 2–3★ reviews citing generic plan content [reported — G2/app-store synthesis, 40+ reviews].
• Northray — competitive / raw-to-analytical: deepest measurement stack (strain, HRV trend, sleep debt) but stops short of telling the athlete what to do with it — deliberately, per our "data not dopamine" philosophy.

Strategic implication: the prescriptive-competitive quadrant is being claimed by Pulsefirn while we hold the measurement high ground next door. Our position is defensible only if measurement depth converts into trustworthy guidance before their guidance becomes good enough. Uncomfortable but true: on this map, momentum is theirs.

3. Feature Comparison Table

4. Messaging Analysis

Pulsefirn

• Their primary claim: "Train exactly right, every day" — homepage hero, captured 2026-06 [verified]
• Target audience signal: ambitious amateurs with coaches or coach-envy; imagery is race-day and structured training blocks
• Emotional hook: aspiration ("your next PB is a plan away")
• Gap or weakness in their messaging: they promise prescription but hide methodology — "trust the black box" is fragile with exactly the data-literate athletes both of us court; their 2–3★ reviews already say the plans feel generic [reported]. The trust position is open, and it's ours to take.

Veloq

• Their primary claim: "Everything you are, on your wrist" — recovery is one bullet among thirty
• Target audience signal: mainstream fitness and lifestyle buyers; recovery is a checkbox feature, not the story
• Emotional hook: simplicity and belonging (one device for everything)
• Gap or weakness in their messaging: no credibility with serious athletes — no methodology, no sport depth. They don't want our niche; the danger is ambient ("why pay monthly when the watch does it free?"), which is a sales objection to arm against, not a positioning battle to fight.

Restwell

• Their primary claim: "Wake up ready" — sleep-first, hardware-free
• Target audience signal: wellness-curious professionals; price-led comparisons
• Emotional hook: ease (no device, €5.99, start tonight)
• Gap or weakness in their messaging: nothing to say about training. Irrelevant head-to-head, but a warning: they normalise a €5.99 anchor for "recovery insights" that shows up in our price-objection notes [reported — sales call synthesis].

5. SWOT Summary

• Strengths: deepest and most transparent measurement stack (exposed methodology is cited in 41% of our 5★ reviews [verified]); coach dashboard with demonstrably sticky cohort (2.1%/mo churn); 7-day battery and screenless focus.
• Weaknesses: monthly churn of 5.8% vs Pulsefirn's reported ~3.9% [reported — their Series C coverage; treat as directional]; no women's health features despite it being a top-3 churn-interview theme [verified]; no prescriptive layer while the market moves prescriptive; 3 app languages caps EU expansion.
• Opportunities: own the "trustworthy guidance" position before Pulsefirn's black-box plans improve; weaponise the coach channel (open API + team dashboard) as a distribution moat; cycle-aware recovery as both product gap-fill and churn fix.
• Threats: Pulsefirn's $80M war chest funds the integration and language gaps we currently exploit [verified — funding announcement]; Veloq's free bundling erodes category willingness-to-pay at the acquisition top-of-funnel; our "measurement, not guidance" stance reads increasingly as "incomplete product" in comparison content [reported — two influential review sites, June 2026].

6. Strategic Recommendations

1. Given Pulsefirn shipped prescriptive plans with opaque methodology and mixed reviews, Northray should ship guidance that shows its work — recommendation plus the "because" drawn from our exposed models, co-signed by coach partners — to take the trust-based guidance position while it is still unoccupied.
2. Given coach-attached subscribers churn at 2.1% vs 5.8%, Northray should make the coach dashboard and open API the centre of 2027 acquisition (coach referral programme, 2 more platform integrations by Q2) to grow the stickiest cohort rather than buying churny direct subscribers.
3. Given cycle-aware recovery is a top-3 churn-interview theme and we are the only player without it, Northray should ship it in H1 2027 to close a retention leak that competitors already market against us.
4. Given week-3-to-6 drop-off drives roughly half of early churn [verified — cohort data], Northray should pilot habit-anchored engagement mechanics (training-consistency streaks, weekly recovery digests). Flagged honestly: this sits in visible tension with our founder's public "we will never gamify recovery" commitments, which have real brand value with our core users. The pilot should be framed — internally and externally — as consistency support rather than gamification, run opt-in behind a flag, and taken to the founder with the cohort data before any public positioning move. If the data doesn't clear that bar, we drop it; a public U-turn is worth paying for only with a large, proven retention effect.
5. Given Veloq resets price expectations rather than competing for our niche, Northray should arm sales and lifecycle comms with a "free score vs recovery system" objection-handling narrative to defend acquisition conversion without being dragged into a feature war we don't need to fight.

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Why it's shaped this way

• The positioning map does not flatter us. Northray sits next to the winning quadrant, not in it, and the implication says "momentum is theirs" out loud — because the Anti-Patterns forbid placing the user's product in the most favourable quadrant without justification, and a self-serving map "provides no strategic value". The axes are market-specific (wellness↔performance, metrics↔guidance) rather than the lazy price/quality default, per the Quality Check on meaningful axes.
• Every substantive claim carries a confidence label — [verified] with capture dates, [reported] with the source named, [assumed] where it's inference — applying references/intel-sourcing-guide.md's discipline. Pulsefirn's ~3.9% churn is explicitly downgraded to "directional" because it comes from funding-round press, which the guide classifies as the competitor's messaging with a byline.
• Feature parity is never treated as quality parity. Pulsefirn "has" prescriptive plans (✅) and the strategic note records that execution is weak per 2–3★ review synthesis — exactly the Anti-Pattern about equivalent checkmarks hiding meaningful quality differences, and exactly the fact recommendation #1 is built on.
• The SWOT's weaknesses are the sharpest numbers in the document (5.8% vs 3.9%, top-3 churn theme, 3 languages) because the Quality Checks demand weaknesses and threats "not be softened" — and because this doc feeds a Series B deck, where a discovered soft spot costs more than a disclosed one.
• Recommendation #4 handles the political landmine diplomatically but doesn't bury it. The founder's anti-gamification stance is named as a brand asset with real value, the pilot is scoped to be reversible (opt-in, flagged, reframed as "consistency support"), and the kill condition is explicit. Omitting it would sanitise the analysis; stating it without the framing would get the document — not the idea — rejected.
• Every recommendation is in the Given/should/to format with a falsifiable action ("2 more platform integrations by Q2", "ship in H1 2027"), not generic strategy advice — the Quality Check requires specific and actionable, and #5 even recommends not fighting, which is a decision, not a hedge.
• Veloq is analysed as a category threat, not a rival — the messaging section explicitly routes it to sales enablement rather than positioning. Treating every competitor as the same kind of threat is how teardowns turn into feature-war shopping lists.
• The intel is dated ("captured June 2026, re-verify after two quarters") because undated competitive facts rot; the document tells its future reader when to stop trusting it.

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Supporting file: templates/teardown-skeleton.md

Competitor Teardown: [Your product] vs [A], [B], [C]

Prepared for: [sales enablement / strategy / investor deck] · Date: [date] · Re-verify after: [date + 1-2 quarters] Sourcing: claims are labelled [verified] / [reported] / [assumed] — see references/intel-sourcing-guide.md

1. Landscape overview

≤150 words: the market dynamic, how it segments, where the white space is. Write it last.

2. Positioning map

Axis X: [dimension buyers actually trade off] · Axis Y: [second dimension]

Our position & implication: [where you sit and what that means strategically — not why you're best]

3. Feature comparison

10-15 rows. ✅ has it · 🟡 partial/plan-gated · ❌ lacks it. Every non-obvious cell carries its confidence label. Rows with no strategic note are candidates for deletion.

4. Messaging analysis

[Competitor A] (homepage captured [date])

• Primary claim: · Audience signal: · Emotional hook:
• Gap we could own: [what their messaging can't say]

(repeat per competitor)

5. SWOT (ours, in this landscape)

• Strengths: [2-3, each one a differentiator a customer would name]
• Weaknesses: [2-3, unsoftened — include the one sales keeps hearing]
• Opportunities: [2-3 gaps from sections 3-4]
• Threats: [2-3 — include the competitor move that would hurt most]

6. Recommendations

1. Given [observation from above], we should [action] to [outcome]. (owner: — )
2. …

3-5, each traceable to a finding in sections 2-5. A recommendation with no section behind it is opinion.

Verification queue