The Day 1 Advantage: A Founder’s Playbook for Competitive Readiness

I really love talking to founders because I'm a founder myself and I know the things we can go through when we are building from scratch. And we're, how to say, there's a saying, we are crazy when we look or when we search, we are great when we find. So until we find, we are all considered as crazy by a lot of people around us. So yeah, that I can totally understand. The reality we live in. But for today, I want to talk about something, let's say, competitive readiness or compete ready from day one for founders. And this is something like really important to me because just to give you a little bit of my background, I spent 20 years working for corporations, publicly traded companies in Europe, in North Africa, in Canada and the US as well, privately held companies as well, startups as well. Built over 10 competitive intelligence functions. And competitive intelligence function basically is learning about what your competitors are doing and helping decision-making about that. It's not like just informing the company, but doing something about it. And this is something that really, really is important to me, especially now with everything that's happening with AI, with agent and, and how fast competition is moving, how fast the markets are shifting and decisions are made. And we can't afford to do things as we did before. We're talking about linear versus exponential, and exponential is not just a word we want to use, but there are way more things being done in a day. So the first is And I felt it myself, by the way, when I started my company for the CI platform. It's, uh, the clock is ticking very fast, very quickly, and the competition is on from day one. Competition for capital. I mean, if you're raising, whether from angels or, I don't know, VCs, you always have the question, who are your competitors and what they are doing and what they are, what you are doing differently. So it's not only that, I'm gonna go back to it, but you have the talents as well. A lot Startups and companies are competing for the talent, especially if it's niche, if it's a specific area. So you have to keep an eye on that and early adopters because we are crazy until we find and we need to find those crazy adopters early on to believe in whatever, what we are building. And there's a fight for that too. And especially now because everything has been diluted. I mean, the messaging, You pick any industry or pick any service or product, you will find a thousand companies talking about exactly the same thing. So how to stand out? And knowledge, it's not a secret, but it's deeper than that. So for us, and a lot of conversations I had with many people, and look, bear with me here, it's my experience talking with a lot of people and other people that I know. Talking about how they perceive competition and the knowledge about competition. A lot of us, a lot of people believe that it's for large companies having teams of competitive intelligence professionals. This is the case, this was the case. And at the beginning, a lot of startups and founders focus on building the product and getting the first customers. And a lot of them say, we don't care about competition. And you hear it even from how to say, innovators and big name startups, they're saying we don't care about competitors, we're just obsessed about the customer and we just deliver value to the customer and that's it. And it's considered as phase 2 because as soon as they get to the Series A or Series B, their board and their investors, they will start to push them to understand or to capture more market share and they need to understand their market. So for me, my goal maybe is to to just share this message that knowledge about the competitive landscape and your competitors needs to start from day one to master that. And there are so many reasons for that. So it's a credibility builder. First of all, when you talk to investors, I believe, let's say, the BS slide is not the market size and slide and TAM and SAM and SOM because everyone puts numbers there. But the competitive side is the worst to me because everyone puts like, we are the best and they do nothing, or we don't have competition. And that is just, you know, a lie. So I wanted to share this picture. It's 2007. And a lot of people say, hey, biggest innovators, they don't care about competition. Actually, presenting iPhone was based on the comparison with the BlackBerry. And by the way, if you didn't see the movie about BlackBerry, I advise you to watch it, all of you, because it's so much of a, how to say, a course on how competition works and how companies deal with the information about competition. And yeah, there's another one about this guy. When talking about, because famously they were saying that he didn't care about competition, he only cared about the product and being the most innovative guy in his time. It was always about competition and beating the competition and doing better than the competition. It's not comparing to the competition, but being the best in serving customers and solving the problems for customers. So just keep this in mind. Failure, I saw many. I saw many, either it's in startups or large companies. So the first thing I can talk about is the misalignment, the misalignment of the product. People and armies of product managers and engineers working on products completely misaligned with what the market is looking for, or what companies are looking for. And they are so, so, how to say, convinced that what they are doing is the right thing. That they don't bother even doing some, you know, research and analysis about what is out there. Because maybe the problem or the need is already met by other players. And maybe the need is not real. So there's an adjacent field to this. I would advise you to read the Four Steps to Epiphany, old book, but it's still valid because it's talking a lot about customer development, meaning Knowing exactly what the customer is looking for, not just, uh, what you think customers are looking for. And same time, my field, as I said, competitive intelligence and competition, is knowing what exists in the market, uh, in terms of offering as well, because maybe the problem has already been addressed. And you can find some comments about providers, uh, doing that. Um, so it's all, all about— not all about money, but It's a lot about how you price your product, and sometimes just that knowledge of how others are pricing their products in the market can completely make the difference in your market. Maybe you're leaving money on the table, and that— I saw these kind of examples in many companies as well. Pricing strategy can need to rely on intelligence, on knowledge about competitors. And by the way, I don't know if you saw the latest interview of Mark Cuban. You search it on YouTube and he was specifically talking about this and he was merging AI and AI agent with pricing intelligence. So what he was basically saying is that now he is able to ask his agent to monitor, to find the top 3 competitors, find their pricing, and monitor that pricing on a regular basis. So he received notification on a weekly basis on any change on their pricing. This is very simple example, but so important to know what is happening out there. And the third one is the go-to-market, how to say, I saw it firsthand. Let's say a company in HR tech, they were really really, really working on a product very hard. They burned a lot of cash. It came from their own savings and investments, and it was completely blind to what happened in the market. So at some point, they found themselves with a product over a million dollar cost, and there was no buyer, and they didn't have any resources left. So this is the worst a founder can find himself or herself in as a situation. I, I don't want it for anyone. So anyway, knowledge is key, and knowledge leading to decision is what is maybe the most important. Uh, stripping away the enterprise mystique or the gospel. Yeah, we're talking a lot about the field space, this discipline, let's say, when you're looking for information about your competitors, it's espionage or something like that. You have spreadsheets and presentations and big reports and big teams, etc. Everything is gone, even for corporations, large corporations. This is, I'm telling you, it's not just for startups. So as founders, we are the everything or do everything people. So this is just our job. To make sure that we know. And then after that, to make our team adopt the same mindset of always being aware of what's happening outside of the company. Here we're talking about competitors, but can talk about markets, buyers, regulations, technology, whatever is outside of the company. You need to be aware of that. And again, this is the role of the founder and CEO to first to know and second to make sure that the team knows all the time what's happening out there. It's collective intelligence that can make sure that it's not just top-down. It's not just coming from you, the knowledge, or one person in your team or one agent, AI agent doing the job. So that's something important. And the workflow, I can talk to you about the frameworks that Competitive intelligence ads and stuff like that, but a lot of it, it's not like it's not applicable, but it's way more simplified now to go to the essential. First, you have to map, to map your competitive landscape. Mapping competitive landscape meaning identifying who's who, who's doing what, who they are hiring, where they are getting the money from. What their customers or early customers are thinking about them, what is their trajectory. It's important if they are good but they are not growing fast enough, maybe they, they will get eaten very quickly. Tracking, once you identify, let's say, the minimum knowledge you need about competitors, you track them on a regular basis. And this is traditionally, it was done by humans. I started doing my job just going through every competitor website and social media channel and RSS feeds, etc., and get any information. This we can't do it as humans. The good news is that we have plenty of AI agents capable of doing that, and you have the tooling, you have some platforms starting as well. I'm not going to talk about specific solutions, but there's a lot of work done by AI in that sense. I mean, the least you can do is build some skills for your how to say, your Claude CoWork or Gemini Gems or whatever solution you use. And on a regular basis, you capture that knowledge. And the third and the most important thing is to decide what to do about that. It's super important. It's, I mean, information shouldn't lead to knowledge, but it should lead to decision. And this is so overlooked and it gets lost in the, the cycle that, okay, we, we, we map, we monitor, we get information, and we move on to the next thing because we have so many things to do. And this is where a lot of companies that I know of miss the point about intelligence and knowledge and how, what to do with that knowledge. And this is a very simple one. I use it for years, let's say, to compare. And it's oversimplified, oversimplified, by the way, purposefully. But when you compare, you need to compare, let's say, based on different criteria. Let's say about the product, about their go-to, go-to-market, their sales motion, their content, etc. Maybe the message here is to make sure that you compare Objectively, meaning if they are better than you, you have to say it and you have to face it. And as a leader of your company, founder, you will have people working for you or even yourself. You need to be objective and neutral about what's happening out there. I'm really emphasizing on this because as humans, we don't like bad news. And sometimes I was called the doomy gloomy guy within the company because I was bringing those those bad news that nobody wanted to hear about. But it's super important to face the brutal facts. So when I say competitor B or competitor C in any criteria, if they are doing better, we need to put it as red for us. Let's say they are doing better and facing them. Now, to start, you have to start small. Probably you're alone and you are the CEO, Chief Everything Officer. So maybe you start with one competitor, the one name that you see all the time, and you have to study them inside out, knowing most of the things that are available out there about them. That is crucial because next time you have a conversation with your investor or potential investor or potential customer, you don't have to bash any competitor, but you know. And just that knowledge will give you the confidence you need to have proper conversation about, I mean, what's happening out there. And why I'm telling you this, because sometimes you will have a conversation with maybe an investor and they will try to put you in the corner about your knowledge of competitors to tell you, hey, I heard that they are doing this and they are doing this and they are great. But if you know what those competitors are doing, well, you can say, well, respectfully, I can disagree and I will disagree because Based on what we know, and we don't have to know 100%, but we know that they are struggling with their finance. So they can claim a lot of product features, but they can't sustain that growth. So the investor or whoever stakeholder you're talking to will take a step back and say, at least this person knows a little bit more about the competition than the other folks I'm talking to. So, and the exercise Really, we have to keep it simple, but we can't rely on AI agents only. We can't make it complicated. We have to build something that we can remember in any conversation. We can bring it and say, here's what we are doing. We know what they are doing. They can be better than us in this and this and this, but we're working on that. We know that they are fragile or they have weaknesses on this and this aspect. So Yeah. So discipline, I would say it's not about tooling because we have a lot of messaging about tooling and technology and whatever AI can do. But it's about building the discipline to learn. We will never know everything, but we will always learn new things about what's happening out there. And the path of least resistance, because it's time consuming. So a lot of people disconnect just because it's taking too much time and too much energy. So they they want to delegate that to someone or to an agent now. But it's tricky because you don't memorize that knowledge. So at least you have to take some couple of minutes per day. I put 15 minutes, but honestly, I think it's more than that to just make sure that we are learning every day about what is happening out there about competitors and beyond. And I see here key intelligence topics. That's what we call in the competitive intelligence space and intelligence community overall. It's specific topics that you want to learn about. Let's say if you have— you had a conversation with someone and they told you that they're cutting their price by 50% and this is the norm and you are too expensive, blah blah blah. So that's specific key intelligence topic. Let's say what is the position of our pricing compared to the next best options we have in the market. And you learn about that, and the next day you do something else, etc. So keep learning. That's maybe what I want to do. Keep learning because it's super important for you to have that confidence about what's happening out there. And it's not like super high level. You have to go deeper than that. So The sequence I keep in wherever I go, any conversation I have, any conference I talk. Anyway, excuse my French. I'm a French-speaking guy, so I'm looking for my word in English. But in any talk I give, I always talk about the what, the so what, and now what, and what next maybe. But let's start with this tree. So if you are doing the job yourself, looking for that information, so the what, what is the information itself? Second, so what. I mean, here it says the context, but it's more about what does it mean for me? What's in it for me? Is it good? Is it bad? Would it impact me? How would it impact me? And the third one is, now what? Okay, now I know what happened, what it means for me. What am I going to do about it? So am I going to do something right now, or am I going to monitor it? Doing nothing, maybe it's a decision as well. Not for now. And I keep track of it. No, don't lose it because many companies, they say later in 3 months we will do something about it and they completely forget about that intelligence and that analysis. And then 3 months ago they go again and they do everything from scratch. This is not a good idea. So this is for you and also for your teams. So if you're working with the people bringing you intelligence, always bring that sequence. What is happening? Okay, tell me more about it. And they explain everything that is happening. Okay, so what, what does it mean for my company? What does it mean for us? Does it, does it hurt? Is it an opportunity? Is it something we need to keep an eye on? And then now what, what decision we need to make? We have to do something about it. Monitoring, keep monitoring and inform me in 3 months. Maybe it's a, it's a, it's the decision to make. And even for AI agents, you can do that schedule. An update in one month or something like that, you can give the task and you can even ask the agent to put it in your calendar. That's not— by the way, I'm talking a lot about agents. I'm, how to say, not for or against, but this is the way right now. A lot of the things we used to do manually are just done in a fraction of the time we used to do before. So learn about them if you're not already doing that. Use them for the research. I know that a lot of the platforms over there are offering deep research and stuff like that, but make it specific to your organization. Make it take the context of your organization. It's not just generic LLM answers. You won't go far with that. Chief Everything Officer, I was talking about that. So yeah, the hiring, uh, I mean, I'm starting from the bottom, but fundraising, you have, uh, if you can get your hand on that type of information, uh, how to say, uh, yeah, uh, I mean, on this, on one side, what investors are investing in and what your competitors are, or where your competitors are getting their money from, or where they are going to get money. And this is surprisingly a lot of information that you can gather out there because we as humans share a lot. And you know, it's public information, it's not something— nothing confidential, nothing you shouldn't have as information. But it's just we don't take the time and energy to get that information. So maybe just the extra mile can get you more than the average. Pricing, go-to-market— this is the obvious, uh, all of what they are doing. You collect it, analyze it, summarize it, and make sense of it for your company and then decide what to do about it. Maybe a go-to-market strategy is not that good and you don't have to follow or to respond to that because sometimes, you know, you're just giving air to the competitor when you're trying to have a competitive response from a marketing perspective and building a comparative page and trying to destroy them with the comparative page or something like that. Maybe it's not needed. It depends on the case. Positioning the hiring. Hiring is super important. When you see on different job boards and websites which kind of profiles they're hiring and where they are hiring them, that gives you clues about what they are about, what they are doing. And also beyond that, it's the knowledge of what their focus, uh, where their focus is right now. So I give you another example. It's more about— I mean, it's a mix between GTM and hiring. So they were hiring engineers specific for specific field. This is one company, one competitor, uh, in a previous job, um, uh, and they were— they started talking in conferences about specific topic and they didn't have any offering. Back then about, about what they were talking about. They were just talking about trends and the future, etc. So that was the signal. And for me and my team, what we did, we built the necessary knowledge about what they're working on, because our assumption with high confidence is that they were working on a new capability to compete directly against us, the company I was working for before. And 6 months down the road, they released a new capability that was completely targeting the company I was working for. So you have clues and those signals that you can get from hiring, from their GTM position, in their conferences where they are talking. If you have an interview with their founders, with their leaders, get that information. If you can attend to conferences they are presenting at, well, it's public, anyone can attend, so you can go there. Uh, 30 days, Look, this what you see here, I used to present, let's say, 100 days readiness plan. This is for corporations and for executives and the competitive intelligence teams. I'm talking about 30 days, and 30 days is generous because right now the pace and the way things are moving, you just watch what's happening between Frontier Model Labs and kind of LLMs that they're pushing and tools and product. It's insane. It's insane. It's amazing for me as a competitive intelligence guy because I love that. But it's, I mean, it completely changes how we perceive time and how much time we have to be ready. So I would say if you are starting from day zero, you don't have anything, Take no more than 10 days to map the landscape. I don't care, find the hours, but map the landscape. When I say landscape, the first competitor, the top 3 competitors, the top 10 competitors, you can stop there. You can stop at the 3 competitors only. Okay, just, and define your key intelligence topics, which is what is the crucial knowledge about competitors I need to know first. That is from the beginning. Second phase, day 10 to 20, build and ship. And this is about building those AI agents I was mentioning before or hiring people, but it's not 10 days, obviously. So I'm talking more about AI and stuff like that. So once you map your landscape and you define your key intelligence topics or what you need to know about competition, you can delegate it to agents. So you have to build them the right way so you don't have to do a lot of back and forth in order to optimize them over time. You need to optimize them, but it's important upfront to have— to give them the right instructions, the right context, so they can get you the information you're looking for on a regular basis. So Yeah, connecting the wiring between those agents and your data sources. For example, this is something important to me, you need to connect to where your knowledge lives, not just about competitors, but everything else. For me, I use Notion. It's not a recommendation, or I love it, by the way, but I'm just saying that I'm using this tool. Some people use Confluence, others use other platforms, but you need to connect your agents and whatever you're using to that knowledge base or where it lives because you need to consolidate everything in that place. So tomorrow you can bring back that knowledge as context, as memory. You don't want it to be, let's say, you go to Gemini, you ask a question, and then a few weeks down the road, you go back to Gemini, you you search for that conversation and then you start to follow up on that conversation. You want your agent to be smarter than that by resurfacing all the knowledge gathered before and consolidated. And then you take the time to refine because it's never good the first time. Give it the instructions about what you're looking for, the frequency and the format. Let's say what you want to to get as output. Is it a comparison tab? Is it a brief? Is it an alert whenever something happens? So all the outputs of competitive intelligence can be mapped, and I can talk about that later, or if you have questions, please reach out. I don't mind. But give yourself 30 days, not more, to be, let's say, how to say, ready. Readiness, it's a lot about knowledge and linking that knowledge to decision. So as I was mentioning before, Decision engineer as a founder, I mean, this is our job anyway, but we are— look, many companies, many startups are too focused on internal environment, not external environment. But take any system, a planet doesn't live alone. Earth is not alone in the galaxy. We have the solar system and it's all moving together. So it's really the position of your startup or company relative to its environment. Super important. Now you have a lot of noise, a lot of Twitter sphere. Everyone is saying this is great. Others saying this is disastrous. But all of that noise, it has to be filtered. As I mentioned before, the AI layer, you have plenty of tools to help you to do that. And you need to end up with a decision memo or decision brief. So what do we need to do? And that memo needs to survive, let's say, the information itself. It stays within your company and whatever system you need, you use, but you need to be able to resurface it a couple of months down the road or a couple of years or whatever you need. So that is something that I'm talking about a lot. Yeah. Traps to avoid. Well, look, I mean, regardless of the context, content you see here, I see in my conversations a lot of, uh, people and companies, they say— this is something I heard a few, a few weeks ago, uh, I asked, uh, what do you know about your competitors and how do you competitive— do you do competitive intelligence? And They told me, well, we see, let's say, the deals we have and we see the name that comes up more in the deals. And this is basically what we track. I said, it's good, but it's not enough. It's far from enough. And this is maybe an issue I see with a lot of companies. It's really taking it as a luxury or maybe second order or second priority, where it's really, really at the center of what we're doing— knowledge. And that piece of knowledge is not focused on enough. So yeah, whatever you're doing, maybe my message is Take the time, take the time to just make sure that you are putting the energy in identifying who those competitors are, what they're doing, who they are hiring, what their products are about, their pricing, their funding, their founders, what they're doing, their leaders. Maybe there are issues with their leaders, who knows. So if you have a lot of noise and a lot of problems with the company, maybe, you know, It's not a good place for people to go work in or something like that. So yeah, it's putting the hours, as I said before, for identifying, then putting the agents in place. Or if you have people in your team who can do the job, that would be wonderful because there's way more intelligence you can gather than just rely on agent and web. This is something I didn't talk about, but I can talk more about it. Look, everything that we're talking about is web and social media, but how about, let's say, trade shows? I mean, in my experience, trade shows, I learned so much, and it's way more than what we can find on the website or a blog or social media or Reddit or something like that. And it will never be surfaced by AI or agents. So this is the missing pieces in everything that you see talked about in terms of AI and intelligence. The other one is field intelligence. Field intelligence, when talking, conversation with people, conversation with your salespeople, sales guy, or your salesperson yourself if you are very early stage. But chances are you have a couple of people doing sales for you, or you have early customers. And early customers, they can share so much about what's happening out there. Investors themselves, potential investors, even if they decide not to invest in your company, they will most of the time tell you about what they know about such and such player and what they are doing. This is priceless. And field intelligence is super important in our job as founders to gather as much knowledge as we can about what's happening out there. And we do it instinctively because even me, when I have a conversation with people, I know that We do it instinctively. We collect information. But it's too, how to say, in French we say bricolage. It's not systematized. It's not orchestrated. And that orchestration is important because it's not just about you as a person having it in your mind, but making sure that the system, which is your company or startup, is getting all that knowledge, sharing it across the organization, and make sure that it serves the memory of the organization over time. So 2 years down the road, you know that you went to such trade show and you saw the competitor showing such and such feature. And then 2 years down the road, maybe they retired the product entirely because it didn't work. So anyone who's telling you, hey, why don't we do as the competitor did or something like that, you can bring them back to the whole story about what happened with the competitor, why it didn't work. And why we should do something different. That's just one illustration. And AI can help with that, but it can't replace us humans doing the job of collecting, analyzing, and making sure that we're making decisions based on those pieces of intelligence. So yeah, I mean, I would be mindful of time because obviously I can spend the whole day talking about this and go as deep as you want, talking about how we can do that for startups. I mean, how you can do it. It's not how, I'm not trying to sell anything here. It's more to the approach, the methodologies to do it. But just keep in mind, keep it simple. You will have those conversations a lot, so you want to have the right answers for your investors, stakeholders, board members, your team as well. So knowledge is key if it leads to decisions. So make sure that whatever you learn is factored in the decision-making process, not just hanging in there as information. Oh, we learned one day about something. And the sequence, as I mentioned before, is what, so what, now what. Always, always about the now what. What are we going to do about this? So,