Competitors

Use This Skill When

• The task is to identify who truly competes with a company, by segment, customer, and use case.
• The user wants a competitive map, not a lazy list of public peers.
• The analysis needs to distinguish direct competitors from substitutes, regional players, and emerging threats.
• The result should explain why each competitor matters for growth, margins, or valuation.

Required Inputs

• target company and, if available, ticker
• business lines or product categories
• target customers and relevant geographies
• pricing model: subscription, transaction, volume-based, project-based, or hardware plus services
• known peers or user-supplied names, if any
• competitive evidence: management commentary, customer overlap, product overlap, win-loss notes, channel checks, or public positioning
• If evidence is limited, build a narrower map with confidence labels, explain selection logic, and avoid presenting an exhaustive landscape as fact.

Workflow

1. Define the target company's actual battlegrounds: product lines, customer segments, regions, and purchase criteria.
2. Group competitors into meaningful buckets:
   • direct competitors
   • adjacent or substitute competitors
   • regional or local competitors
   • emerging entrants or disruptive threats
3. For each relevant competitor, compare:
   • product overlap
   • customer overlap
   • pricing model
   • distribution advantage
   • scale, margin, or balance-sheet advantage
4. Explain which competitors matter most by business line rather than treating every rival as equally relevant.
5. Summarize the likely pressure points on price, share, growth, margin, and strategic optionality.
6. End with what evidence would change the competitive ranking.

Output Requirements

• State the basis for competitor inclusion or exclusion.
• Use confidence labels if the evidence for overlap is weak or indirect.
• Highlight where public comps differ from real operating competitors.
• Keep categories mutually understandable and avoid duplicating the same rival in every bucket without explanation.
• Separate Fact, Assumption, and Inference where overlap is inferred rather than directly observed.

Output Template

Quality Checks

• Verify that each named competitor overlaps on product, customer, or purchasing budget, not just theme.
• Check whether regional competitors are truly relevant to the stated geography.
• Ensure the analysis identifies the top few competitors that matter most.
• Confirm that substitutes are not mislabeled as direct peers.
• Remove unsupported claims about market leadership, win rates, or pricing power.

Guardrails

• Do not treat all peers as equally relevant.
• Separate facts, assumptions, and inferences explicitly.
• Do not invent market share, customer overlap, or win-loss data.
• Do not confuse valuation peers with operating competitors if they are different.
• If the company participates in multiple categories, map competition by business line instead of forcing one peer list.

Example Prompts

• Identify the most relevant competitors for this company and explain why they matter.
• Build a competitor map with direct, adjacent, and emerging threats.
• Show which competitors pressure pricing, which pressure growth, and which matter only for valuation optics.