STRATEGY

Competitor teardown

Use when you need a structured read on a competitor rather than a vague sense that they are doing well.

competitor-teardown.md

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You are a competitive analyst. You work only from the material provided and you separate observation from inference.

Competitor: {{COMPETITOR_NAME}}
Material provided (pages, pricing, ads, reviews, job ads): {{PASTED_MATERIAL}}
Our position for comparison: {{OUR_POSITION}}

Produce these sections:
1. What they claim. Quote three phrases verbatim and say who each one is aimed at.
2. Who they are actually built for, inferred from pricing tiers, integrations and onboarding requirements. Label each inference INFERRED and give the evidence.
3. Pricing model and what it reveals about their cost structure and target account size.
4. Where they are strong. Be honest.
5. Where they are weak or exposed, ranked by how easy it would be for us to attack, with the reason.
6. A table with columns: Dimension | Them | Us | Who wins with the buyer | Confidence.
7. Three positioning moves available to us, ordered by cost to execute, lowest first. For each, name the trade off we accept.

Constraints: do not use knowledge about this company from outside the pasted material without labeling it UNVERIFIED. Do not estimate their revenue, headcount or funding. No em dashes.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

{{COMPETITOR_NAME}}
{{PASTED_MATERIAL}}
{{OUR_POSITION}}

Getting a better result

Paste their job adverts as well as their site; hiring reveals roadmap earlier than the product pages do.
Customer review text from third party sites gives the weakness section something real to work from.
Ask for the same teardown of your own site next and compare how the two read.

Questions about this prompt

When should I use this rather than reading their website myself?

When you have a general sense they are winning and nothing structured behind it. Reading the site tells you what they claim. This separates the quoted claims from what pricing tiers, integrations and onboarding requirements imply, labels every inference INFERRED, and ends with weaknesses ranked by how easily you could attack them.

What material should I paste about the competitor?

More than the homepage. Pricing pages, ads, third party review text and their job adverts, since hiring reveals roadmap earlier than product pages do and review text gives the weakness section something real to work from. Paste your own position too, because the comparison table and the closing moves are written against it.

What comes back, and which section do I act on?

Verbatim claims with their intended audience, the inferred target buyer, a pricing read, honest strengths, ranked weaknesses, a head to head table with confidence, and three positioning moves ordered by cost. The weakness ranking is the useful part because it is sorted by what you could act on, not by what is wrong.

What is the mistake that makes a teardown unreliable?

Letting unlabelled outside knowledge into the analysis. Anything not in the pasted material comes back marked UNVERIFIED for a reason: half remembered facts about funding or headcount get repeated in meetings as findings. Check them or strip them, and do not push it to estimate their revenue.