Prompt · Business

Competitor analysis grid from your research notes

Compare competitors side by side on the criteria your customers care about, find where you are genuinely different, and see which gaps in the market are worth testing next.

The prompt

You are a market analyst. Build a competitor analysis grid from my research.

My product or service: [WHAT YOU OFFER AND TO WHOM]
Competitors to compare: [3-6 NAMES, INCLUDING INDIRECT ALTERNATIVES such as spreadsheets or doing nothing]
Criteria customers care about: [e.g. "price, ease of setup, support, integrations, local language"]

My research notes (pricing pages, reviews, demos, sales call notes), labelled by competitor:
"""
[PASTE NOTES]
"""

Produce:
1. A grid: rows are competitors (including us), columns are my criteria plus "Target customer" and "Main message". Use short entries. Write "UNKNOWN" where my notes have no information.
2. For each competitor: their clearest strength and their clearest weakness, as customers describe them in my notes.
3. Our position: where we are clearly better, about equal, and clearly worse. Be honest.
4. Gaps: needs mentioned in reviews or calls that no competitor serves well.
5. Three positioning statements we could test, in the form "For [customer] who [need], we are the [category] that [difference]."
6. A list of facts to verify, especially prices and features, with the date I should check them.

Rules: use only my notes. Do not fill in prices, features or market share from memory, because they change often. If you can browse the web and I ask you to, add sources with links and the date accessed.

Example output

Example (excerpt):
| Competitor | Price (entry) | Setup time | Support | Target customer | Main message |
| Us | €19/month | ~1 hour | Email, Italian and English | Small studios | "Invoicing without accounting jargon" |
| Tool A | €25/month | UNKNOWN | Chat, English only | Freelancers | "All-in-one finance" |
| Spreadsheets | Free | Days | None | Everyone | — |

Gap: three reviews of Tool A complain about invoices in other languages; nobody highlights multilingual invoicing.
Position to test: "For small studios with foreign clients, we are the invoicing tool that speaks both languages."

When to use it

Use this prompt when you are positioning a new product, updating your website messaging, preparing a pitch or deciding which features to build. It suits founders, product managers, marketers and small business owners. The best moment is after you have done some homework, such as reading competitors’ pricing pages, trying their products and collecting reviews, and need to make sense of it. It is also a good exercise before a sales hire joins, so they learn how you compare from day one.

How to customize it

[MY PRODUCT] should name the customer as well as the offer. Competitors differ depending on whom you are selling to.
[COMPETITORS] should include indirect alternatives. For many products, the strongest competitor is a spreadsheet, an agency or doing nothing.
[CRITERIA] should come from customers, not from your feature list. Interviews, reviews and lost-deal notes are good sources.
[RESEARCH NOTES] are the evidence base. Label them by competitor and include the date you collected them.

Why it works

A grid makes comparison concrete: every competitor is judged on the same criteria. Including your own product in the grid and asking for an honest “clearly worse” section pushes against the common habit of comparing only on your strengths.

The prompt keeps the analysis tied to your notes because pricing and features change frequently, and a model’s memory of them may be out of date or wrong. “UNKNOWN” entries make research gaps visible. The gaps and positioning steps move from description to decision: they show where you might win, in a format you can test with customers, ads or a landing page.

Tips and variations

Add a column for “How they describe themselves” using the exact words from each competitor’s homepage; repeated phrases across competitors show you which messages are already crowded and hard to own.
Repeat the exercise every quarter and keep the old grids; changes over time are often more revealing than a single snapshot.
Ask for a one-slide summary for your team or investors.
Turn the strongest positioning statement into ads with our ad copy variants for A/B testing prompt.
Our guide on evaluating an AI tool before switching shows a similar comparison method applied to software.

#Competitor Analysis #Market Research #Positioning #Strategy

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