Mine your competitors' complaints: the highest-leverage pre-roadmap move for startups
_AustinCalvert_ · x · 2026-09-27
Danni Chen shares the highest-leverage exercise she recently had a startup do: mine competitors' user complaints before building the roadmap.
The playbook:
- Pick top 5 competitors and crawl Reddit, X, G2, YouTube comments, Discord, forums and review sites using tools like ActionBook, Exa, Firecrawl, Apify or Perplexity
- Build one table: complaint | frequency | severity | competitor | still unsolved?
- Complaints everyone has but nobody has fixed usually mark the opportunity
One doc can dictate what to build, how to position, and what goes in the next ad. Her takeaway: competitors already paid for the customer research — you just need to collect it, far more useful than another 10 internal strategy meetings.
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