SKILLS.MD

Competitive teardown

Analyze a competitor's positioning and gaps.

When agents use this

Analyzes a competitor's product, positioning, and pricing from real sources, then surfaces their strengths, weaknesses, and the gaps you can exploit. Use when the user names a competitor or alternative and wants it studied, wants a comparison against their own product, or wants a differentiation angle, even if they just paste a competitor's URL and ask what you think.

Competitive teardown

Study a competitor from real sources and turn it into a clear point of view. Every factual claim traces to something you actually read, or it is labeled as unknown. A confident teardown built on invented facts is worse than no teardown.

Ground the analysis first

Do not write from memory of the company. Memory of pricing and features is stale and often wrong.

  1. Fetch the competitor's live pages: home, pricing, product or features, and docs or changelog if reachable. If you cannot fetch a page, say so; do not fill the gap from assumption.
  2. Pull dates. A pricing page or changelog has a state as of the day you read it. Note the date so the reader knows how fresh the read is.
  3. Where a fact matters and you could not verify it (private pricing, seat minimums, roadmap), write "unverified" next to it rather than guessing a number.

What to extract

  1. Target customer and the core promise. Who the messaging is aimed at and the one claim above the fold.
  2. Positioning. How they frame themselves against the category and named alternatives.
  3. Pricing. Tiers, what gates each tier, and the model (per seat, usage, flat). Quote the actual numbers with the date read.
  4. Product surface. The features they lead with and the ones buried. What they emphasize reveals who they are selling to.
  5. Weaknesses and unmet needs. Read reviews and support threads where reachable, not only their own marketing. Distinguish a real gap from a deliberate scope choice.

Gotchas

  • The single biggest failure of this skill is inventing plausible facts: a pricing tier, a feature, a customer count that sounds right and is wrong. If it is not from a source you read, it is unverified. Label it.
  • A competitor's marketing describes the product they wish they had. Weight what the docs, changelog, and reviews say over the home page.
  • Absence of a feature in the UI is not proof it does not exist; it may be gated, in beta, or enterprise-only. Say "not found" rather than "does not have."
  • Recency matters. A teardown citing last year's pricing reads as authoritative and misleads. Anchor every number to the date you read it.

Output

Competitive teardown: [competitor] (as of [date read])

Target and promise

[Who they sell to and their core claim.]

Positioning and pricing

[How they frame themselves; tiers and numbers, each with source or marked unverified.]

Strengths

[Genuine ones. Resist dismissing a real competitor.]

Weaknesses and gaps

  • [Gap, and whether it is a true weakness or a deliberate scope choice.]

Where you can win

[2 to 3 exploitable gaps, then a one-line differentiation angle.]

Unverified / needs a human

[Every claim you could not source, listed plainly so nobody mistakes it for fact.]