You're right, you probably shouldn't. Between your listening to customers and paying attention to your team's capabilities, tracking competitors should be the lowest priority.
As a result, you end up ignoring competitors most of the time. I know, because I used to be one of them.
In 2010, when I first moved to Singapore, we were busy building a state-of-the-art e-commerce platform with Python/Django, while ignoring our biggest competitor, a group buying site with an unusable Drupal site. It turns out they were busy securing $1m funding, which they quickly used to scale the team, secure better partnerships and of course, fix their website. We went from not paying any attention whatsoever to keeping track of their every move, but it was too late.
Most founders and SaaS teams operate along this spectrum between ignoring competitors completely and developing an unhealthy obsession with them.
When they ignore competition, it's usually because they believe that listening to customers alone is sufficient, and sometimes because they're too buried on their product roadmap (aka. "build it and they will come"). Tracking competitors feels like a distraction they can't afford.
But customers have options. They look around. They compare you to alternative solutions that you may not even be aware of.
The real risk isn't over-indexing on competitors, it's that you'll be the last one to find out: A competitor drops their price and your close rate dips for weeks before you connect the dots. Someone launches a feature that reframes the category and your "vs." page is suddenly outdated. A rival gets funding and starts outspending you on the channels you depend on. These things happen quietly. And it's not that those who get get blindsided are careless, they're just "busy".
There's a way to do this well, and it doesn't require obsessing or a full-time analyst:
Idenfity them. Customer testimonials, industry news, new category entrants. Keep an open eye, because your real competitors might not even look like competitors at all.
Monitor them. What are they shipping? Are they hiring? Did they change their pricing or rewrite their homepage copy? What are they publishing — blog posts, case studies, ads? What are other people saying about them — reviews, testimonials, press? This is the part that's tedious to do manually and easy to let slide. It's also where the most actionable signal lives.
Analyze them. Not every update matters. A new blog post can be just noise, whereas a pricing restructure is a signal. A series of engineering job posts can indicate aggressive product plans. First VP of Sales hire might suggest a change in ICP. The real value isn't always the firehose, it's separating the wheat from the chaff.
Take action. Update your positioning. Brief your sales team. Adjust your messaging. Share a summary with your co-founder or your board. Competitive knowledge is only useful when it sees the light of day.
All of this is important. Most of it is also tedious, manual, and inconsistent. Right now, there aren't any great options.
You can Google your competitors every few weeks and hope you catch the important stuff. You can ask ChatGPT and get a summary that's half-outdated and half-hallucinated. You can pay $20K+ a year for an enterprise CI platform built for 50-person sales teams.
None of these are real solutions for a SaaS team that takes competition seriously but doesn't have a dedicated person to track it.
That's why we're building CoGrid.
CoGrid monitors your competitors so you don't have to. You add a URL, and CoGrid starts tracking website changes, product updates, social posts, job openings, platform reviews, newsletters and a whole lote more. It also sends you a weekly digest of everything worth knowing.
We built this because we wanted this for ourselves. We think it's good, and with your help, we want to make it better.