Market Core · Competitors · Module
The competitor set
Who is actually competing for the demand — direct rivals, substitutes, in-house alternatives and inaction — defined from what customers consider.
The idea
How it works
Industry-defined competitor sets describe a peer group. The set customers use includes substitutes from other categories, building it internally, and doing nothing — and those three account for a large share of lost demand.
The set is discoverable from loss data and from asking recent buyers what else they considered. Both are cheap and both routinely contradict the assumed list.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Ask buyers what else they considered
Recent buyers remember accurately and answer readily. Their list is the set.
- 02
Include inaction
It wins more often than any named rival and appears on almost no competitor list.
- 03
Rank by where demand actually goes
Not by size or reputation. A small rival taking a third of your losses matters more than a large one taking none.
- 04
Revisit when the category shifts
New substitutes arrive from outside the industry, which is exactly where nobody is looking.
One level in
The components of the competitor set
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Rank the set by where your losses actually go, not by who is largest or best known.
The other modules in competitors
Capability comparison
What each rival can actually do, on the dimensions customers weigh — assessed from evidence, including where they are better.
LearnReading their strategy
What a competitor is trying to become, inferred from where they invest, who they hire and what they decline — more predictive than anything they publish.
LearnMonitoring
The few developments that would change a decision, watched deliberately — because monitoring everything means monitoring nothing.
Learn