Your Competitor Is Probably a Spreadsheet

Open almost any pitch deck and you’ll find the same slide. Four logos in a two-by-two grid, your logo in the winning corner, axes labeled something like “Sophistication” and “Ease of Use.” It took forty minutes to make and it contains no information.

That slide isn’t competitive analysis. It’s a mood board. Real competitive work is harder, less flattering, and considerably more useful.

Start with the comparison set the customer actually uses

The founding error is assuming your competitors are the companies that look like you. They’re not. Your competitors are whatever else your buyer would spend that money and that attention on.

When a buyer sits down to solve their problem, the options on the table are rarely four vendors. They’re usually: keep doing it in the spreadsheet, have Marcus in accounting handle it, hire someone part-time, buy the cheap tool, buy the expensive tool, or do nothing until next quarter. Your beautifully differentiated offering is one line on that list, and it’s competing against a spreadsheet that already works, sort of, and costs nothing.

This is why deals die at “we decided to hold off.” That wasn’t a loss to a rival. That was a loss to inertia, and inertia doesn’t have a logo, a website, or a sales team you can outmaneuver. It has the enormous advantage of already existing.

So the first question isn’t “who are my competitors.” It’s “what did my last ten buyers seriously consider before they talked to me, and what happened to the ones who didn’t buy?” You already have that data. It’s in your inbox and in your head. Most owners have never written it down.

Do the work you can actually do honestly

There’s a lot of theater in competitive intelligence, and a fair amount of it shades into making things up. You cannot know a private competitor’s margins. You cannot know their churn. Anyone who hands you a slide with a competitor’s CAC on it either got it from a leak or invented it, and the second is far more likely.

Here’s what you can know, legitimately, without pretending:

What they say. Their homepage, their pricing page, their job postings. Job postings are the most under-read document in competitive work. A company hiring three enterprise AEs and a compliance lead is telling you exactly where it’s going, in public, for free.

What they charge, or how they charge. Many publish it. Many don’t, and that itself is information — opaque pricing usually signals negotiation, which usually signals variance, which usually signals opportunity at the low end or the high end. If you can’t get the number, get the structure. Per seat versus per project tells you a lot about who they’re built for.

Who they’re built for. Read their case studies. Not for the results — for the customers. Company sizes, industries, titles. That’s their real ICP, whatever the homepage claims.

What their customers complain about. Public reviews, forums, the support docs they wrote to head off recurring problems. A long help article about a workaround is a confession.

What you’ve actually heard. The single richest source is your own lost deals. Ask. Not in a form — in a call, three weeks later, when there’s nothing left to sell. “What did you end up doing?” People will tell you. They’re often relieved to.

Write down where each fact came from. If it’s an inference, label it an inference. If it’s a guess, label it a guess. A competitive picture with three sourced facts and an honest “we don’t know” beats a full grid of confident fiction, because you’ll actually bet on the first one and you shouldn’t bet on the second.

Find the gap, then check that anyone wants it

Once you can see the real comparison set, the useful question emerges: where is there a job that everyone is doing badly?

Gaps are usually not features. They’re usually segments, price points, or service models. The competitor who serves enterprise well but treats a 40-person company like a rounding error. The tool that’s cheap but requires a week of setup nobody has. The incumbent that’s excellent and charges four times what half the market can pay.

But a gap is only a gap if someone is standing in it, unhappy. Plenty of empty space in a market is empty because it’s worthless — a segment nobody serves is sometimes a segment nobody can serve profitably. That’s the discipline: find the gap, then find three buyers in it who’ll tell you they’re unhappy today. If you can’t find three, you found a hole, not a gap.

And when the answer is “the status quo is fine for these people” — believe it. Some buyers genuinely should keep using the spreadsheet. Knowing which ones saves you a year of chasing deals that were never going to close.

The honest version is shorter

A real competitive picture fits on two pages. The comparison set as the customer sees it. What each option costs and who it’s for. Where the sourced facts end and the guesses begin. The gap, and the three people standing in it.

No grid. No axes chosen to make you win.

We build this kind of work bottom-up from countable inputs, with every figure sourced or labeled an assumption — that’s what our market research is. The playbook shows the method if you’d rather run it yourself, which, for a small comparison set you already half-know, you probably can.