Hey all,
🌧️ Happy Sunday from rainy NYC 🌧️
Everyone loves a good stalk. Killer founders are excellent at collecting competitive intelligence. They know exactly how to look competitors up (and down) and discover their secret weapons.
So, how do you stalk your competitors in a way that gives you an unfair advantage?
Let’s break it down.
Marketing: Acquisition, Brand, & Money
1. Pull their top-performing Meta ads
Your job: Every ad your competitor is running is sitting here in public. Search their brand name.
Every ad they're running is sitting there in public: creative, copy, format, and how long it's been running.
The ads that have been running the longest are the winners. You can find these by scrolling all the way down. That's format/messaging/angle that’s working with your shared audience. Now do it better.
2. Reverse-engineer their brand book
Fonts, colors, tone, aesthetic, mission
Tip: You can put a screenshot of any brand into Claude and ask it to identify the font and color
Rly common in D2C to mix a font and color scheme from two different brands that are crushing it (Native did this)
How they describe the problem they solve
This tells you everything about who they think their customer is & how they want to make them feel
Screenshot their website, their LinkedIn banner, their ads. Build a mood board of their identity.
Your job: Figure out where the gap is. What emotion are they not hitting? What customers are they ignoring where there’s PMF? What’s lame about them?
3. Follow the marketing budget
Your job: Figure out where the marketing budget is being spent
B2C
Paid ad channel
Content type (UGC, animated videos, launch videos, statics)
Influencers they work with
New product launches + pushes
Internal team size or agencies they work with
B2B
Conferences they are attending/sponsoring
Events they are showing up at (happy hours, VC events)
Podcasts they are advertising on
Merch they are sending to prospects
PR they are pushing (e.g., mentions repeatedly in the same publications = relationships w/ journalists)
Budget = strategy. Examples:
Going hard on events = betting on IRL.
If they're all over LinkedIn = cornering a buyer persona and trying to pump founder-led sales
If they're sponsoring a random podcast, that niche is probably their fastest-growing vertical OR one they are testing into.
Inner Circle: Know the People in Power Behind the Company
4. Investors: Map their cap table and the network they’re in
Who are their earliest investors? Look on the company website or look up the cap table directly.
Early investors are introducing customers, opening doors, shaping strategy
If a competitor has a specific VC firm behind them, that firm has a portfolio of companies that are probably all warm intros for that competitor's sales team
5. Who are they following
Inner circle people push the company forward like advisors, industry operators, and power connectors
Your job: look at who is commenting on the founder’s LinkedIn posts, look at who the brand is following on IG and X, look at who the brand retweets on X
6. Look at customers on competitor websites → target → ask how it's going
Companies will leave churned customers on their website (tbh, not on purpose)
Reach out and see what’s up. Real customers will tell you exactly what's working, what’s broken, and what they wish existed
Product: Figure Out Their Roadmap & Direction
7. Stalk their open job roles online
Peep the tea
If they're suddenly hiring 3 data engineers = they're building something data-heavy
If they're hiring a Head of Enterprise Sales = they're moving upmarket
If they're posting for a role in a market they don't currently operate in = they're expanding there.
8. Listen to off-the-record convos
These are discussions with industry peers that aren’t recorded and executives say things there that they'd never put in a press release (e.g. what they're working on, what they're seeing in the market)
Panels
Conferences
Fireside chats
Industry events
9. Watch where employees work next
When someone leaves a competitor, where do they go next?
E.g. If they're starting their own companies in an adjacent space, they saw a gap the competitor wasn't filling
E.g. If they’re building in a super niche area of your overlapping vertical, the company is likely building this out internally
Your job: LinkedIn makes this easy. Search the company name, filter for past employees, and sort by most recent.
What people leave to build can show a pattern of what employees thought was exciting
Well, How’d I Do?
Top founders know their competitors' products, customers, investors, and especially their next moves.
You must be prepared to crush your competitors.
This list should help you out. I promise you’ll learn a thing or two😎
I hope you have a wonderful and productive week until we talk next Sunday.
Julia
