Market Scan

Market scan (keep your read current)

Positioning rots. The competitor you sized up six months ago has since rebranded, raised, repriced, or renamed the category. This is the habit that keeps your brief honest about the world outside it.

Use this when: a rival just rebranded or repositioned, a new tool is getting attention in your space, your docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md competitor answers are more than a quarter old, or you just have the feeling the ground moved and your messaging is answering last year's market.

The core idea

research-the-market is the first full pass on the market: venues, launches, the problem in public, rivals, openings. This skill is the refresh after that, focused on what changed.

Your docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md captured the market as it was the day you wrote it. Markets don't hold still. A scan re-checks the outside world against your brief and surfaces the deltas: what changed, and which changes actually threaten or help your positioning. Most don't matter. The scan's job is to find the two or three that do, not to produce a competitor spreadsheet.

Before you start: can your agent see the web?

• If your agent can browse or search the web, it runs the scan for real: competitor homepages, changelogs, pricing pages, launch posts, and recent discussion.
• If it can't, it runs the scan as an interview: it asks what you've noticed and where, and you paste in the pages. Same output, you're the browser. Say which mode you're in up front.

How to run this (for the agent)

• Start from the brief. Read docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md: the rivals ("what do they use instead"), the "why you", the villain, and the current positioning line. That's your baseline to compare against.
• Scan the named rivals first, then the category. For each competitor in the brief, check: homepage headline and positioning, pricing, any rebrand or renamed category, funding or acquisition, and new capabilities that erase the founder's wedge. Then scan for new entrants and category-level shifts (a term everyone suddenly uses, a platform move, an AI or agent shift).
• Report deltas, not descriptions. Do not summarize each competitor. Say what changed since the brief, and for each change, whether it strengthens, threatens, or is irrelevant to the founder's positioning. Rank by "does this move our position."
• Tie every real change to an action. A rival adopting the founder's language means the wedge is eroding: route to positioning-and-story. A new pricing norm means revisit market-to-devs-sell-to-buyers. A dead competitor means an opening. No action, no reason to flag it.
• Update the brief and roadmap. Rewrite the affected lines in docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md (rivals, why-you, villain, positioning) with today's reality and the date, and add any positioning move it triggers to docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md. Keep the tags honest: a competitor's public claim is [assumption] until you have checked it is real.

What actually matters (and what doesn't)

Changes worth acting on:

• A rival repositions onto your wedge or adopts your vocabulary. Your differentiation is eroding. Highest priority.
• A new entrant is getting real traction in your exact lane.
• The category gets renamed (buyers now search a different term than your copy uses).
• A pricing norm shifts (a free tier appears or disappears, seat pricing becomes standard).

Noise to ignore:

• Cosmetic rebrands, new logos, homepage redesigns with the same substance.
• Feature announcements that don't touch your wedge.
• Funding rounds that don't change what the product is or who it is for.

Mistakes that look reasonable

• Reacting to a competitor's launch by copying it. Their move fits their strategy, not yours. Ask what it means for your wedge, not how to match it.
• Scanning everything, changing nothing. A scan that doesn't update the brief or the roadmap was just anxiety with extra steps.
• Treating a rival's marketing claim as fact. "Now with X" on a homepage is a positioning bet, not proof it works. Tag it [assumption].
• Doing it constantly. Monthly, or on a real trigger (a rebrand, a new entrant), is plenty. Daily competitor-watching is procrastination dressed as diligence.

Your next 30 minutes

• Tell your agent which mode you're in (it browses, or you paste).
• List the rivals from your docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md. Scan each for a rebrand, repricing, or repositioning since you wrote it.
• Write down only the changes that touch your wedge. Ignore the cosmetic ones.
• For each real change, mark it strengthens / threatens / irrelevant, and the one action it triggers.
• Update the affected lines in docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md (with the date) and add any positioning move to docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md.

Built from real dev-tool GTM experience, with frameworks from Adam Frankl (The Developer-Facing Startup) and Jakub Czakon (markepear.dev). If the market has shifted under you and you're not sure what it means for positioning, reach out to me on LinkedIn.