track-startup-competitors

name

track-startup-competitors

description

Track startup competitors across public websites, pricing pages, product pages, changelogs, documentation, public X posts, GitHub organizations and repositories, package registries, search engines, news, public communities, review platforms, job listings, and web archives. Use when Codex needs to create a competitor baseline, compare historical snapshots, find recent market moves, monitor a watchlist, investigate one competitor, detect pricing or positioning changes, verify product launches, distinguish confirmed changes from rumors, or generate an evidence-linked Competitor Change Map with recommended responses.

Track Startup Competitors

Build durable competitive intelligence from public evidence. Search broadly, conclude conservatively, and keep every observation, change, inference, and recommendation traceable to its source.

Language

• Conduct research, analysis, labels, exports, and reports in English.
• Preserve non-English source text separately from a labeled English translation.
• Never translate, paraphrase, or summarize a statement and present it as a verbatim quote.

Read the relevant references

• Read references/source-strategy.md before researching any competitor.
• Read references/identity-and-deduplication.md before resolving domains, handles, repositories, people, or duplicate coverage.
• Read references/evidence-and-confidence.md before classifying observations, changes, or inferences.
• Read references/impact-scoring.md before ranking changes or recommending a response.
• Read references/snapshot-schema.md before creating or updating a snapshot.
• Read references/report-schema.md before generating the analysis JSON or report.
• Read references/research-safety.md before accessing social, community, archived, blocked, or login-gated sources.

Choose the mode

• baseline — Create the first verified snapshot. Never claim change detection without an earlier comparable snapshot.
• pulse — Find material activity within a stated window, normally 7 or 30 days.
• compare — Compare two saved snapshots and explain confirmed additions, removals, and modifications.
• deep-dive — Investigate one competitor across all accessible public source groups.
• market-shift — Find a pattern supported across multiple competitors without treating correlation as causation.
• watchlist — Refresh every competitor and produce a change map. Do not schedule recurring runs unless the user explicitly asks.

Run the workflow

1. Establish the watchlist

• Inspect the startup URL, supplied competitor list, previous snapshots, and existing research before asking questions.
• Record the startup's product, target segment, geography, business model, and decisions this research should inform.
• Resolve each competitor's canonical name, domain, public social handles, GitHub organization, product names, and known aliases.
• Keep direct competitors, adjacent alternatives, incumbents, and substitutes visibly separate.
• Ask only for missing context that materially changes the scan or response.

2. Create a source plan

• Search official product surfaces first, then code and release surfaces, search discovery, social and community sources, company signals, and archives.
• Allocate a bounded source budget per competitor. Prioritize material surfaces over exhaustive low-value crawling.
• Record every attempted source group as available, partial, blocked, not_found, or not_applicable.
• Treat Google and other search results as discovery only. Open the underlying page before using it as evidence.
• If X, LinkedIn, a review site, or an archive is inaccessible, mark it unavailable. Never reconstruct missing content from snippets or memory.

3. Build an immutable evidence ledger

• Create one evidence item per source observation with a stable ID.
• Preserve source URL, source type, authority, competitor, captured time, published time when available, title, exact short excerpt, normalized observation, and access status.
• Separate facts from public opinions and from analyst interpretation.
• Prefer primary sources. Use secondary sources to discover or corroborate, not to overwrite official evidence.
• De-duplicate syndicated announcements, reposts, copied reviews, mirrored documentation, and the same claim repeated across pages.

4. Create or refresh the snapshot

• Represent every comparable fact as a stable signal key such as pricing:pro:monthly, positioning:primary-audience, or github:api-sdk:latest-release.
• Store normalized values separately from display text.
• Cite the evidence IDs behind every signal.
• Preserve unknown values as unknown; absence of evidence is not evidence of removal.
• Save the snapshot before interpreting it.

5. Detect changes deterministically

• When two snapshots exist, run:

node track-startup-competitors/scripts/compare_snapshots.mjs <previous.json> <current.json> <changes.json>

• Treat a signal as added, removed, or modified only when both snapshots had comparable source coverage.
• Downgrade or suppress changes caused by blocked pages, missing scans, reordered text, cookie banners, dates, counters, tracking parameters, or cosmetic markup.
• Never claim that a strategy changed solely because a page changed.

6. Corroborate and interpret

• Classify each item as confirmed_change, corroborated_signal, unconfirmed_signal, community_reaction, or noise.
• Connect signals only when their timing, entity identity, and business meaning align.
• Label strategic interpretations explicitly as inferences.
• Look for counter-evidence and unchanged signals that weaken the interpretation.
• Distinguish what changed, why it may matter, and what remains unknown.

7. Score impact and choose a response

• Score relevance, magnitude, strategic proximity, commercial consequence, persistence, evidence strength, and urgency.
• Keep confidence separate from impact. A high-impact rumor remains low confidence.
• Place each change into act, investigate, watch, or ignore.
• Recommend customer research, measurement, messaging changes, product work, or no action as appropriate.
• Never recommend copying a competitor merely because it launched something.

8. Create the deliverables

• Save snapshots as competitor-radar/snapshots/<date>-<watchlist-slug>.json.
• Save the structured analysis as outputs/<startup-slug>-competitor-analysis.json.
• Generate the interactive report:

node track-startup-competitors/scripts/generate_report.mjs <analysis.json> <report.html>

• Export the evidence ledger:

node track-startup-competitors/scripts/export_evidence.mjs <analysis.json> <evidence.csv>

• Save the report as outputs/<startup-slug>-competitor-change-map.html.
• Save the ledger as outputs/<startup-slug>-competitor-evidence.csv.
• Create outputs/<startup-slug>-response-brief.md when the analysis supports actionable responses.
• Return clickable absolute links to every artifact.

9. Verify before delivery

• Open the report and test search, filters, evidence links, responsive layout, and empty states.
• Confirm that every displayed change points to both old and new evidence when applicable.
• Confirm that every inference is labeled and includes counter-evidence or uncertainty.
• Confirm that blocked sources are shown as coverage gaps, not silently omitted.
• State the strongest confirmed move, the most important weak signal, the most dangerous uncertainty, and the next monitoring step.

Enforce research integrity

• Never bypass authentication, private accounts, paywalls, CAPTCHAs, robots restrictions, or access controls.
• Never invent a post, page, price, release, quote, date, handle, metric, or archived version.
• Never use a search-result snippet as final evidence.
• Never treat stars, followers, likes, hiring counts, or posting frequency as business success without support.
• Never treat a feature announcement as proof of availability, adoption, quality, or revenue impact.
• Never treat community sentiment as representative market research.
• Never infer a removal when the current source was blocked or not scanned.
• Prefer INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE to a confident unsupported conclusion.

Default report order

1. Executive market pulse
2. Coverage and source health
3. Material changes
4. Market movement timeline
5. Cross-competitor themes
6. Act / Investigate / Watch / Ignore board
7. Competitor profiles
8. Uncertainty and counter-evidence
9. Filterable evidence ledger
10. Snapshot and methodology details