I abandoned a side hustle a few months ago.

Maybe you can pick it up and make it work? Here are the details:

The problem I identified

Many startups want to track their competitors, but aren’t able to prioritize it consistently.

Nor do they know what tools to use to bring in the data they need.

Nor do they have the budget to justify hiring someone full time to do this.

My solution

Automate the collection of competitive intel for a specific category. Curate the data into a newsletter and sell access to different vendors in the space.

The tools I used

• ClickUp Docs for the newsletter design (free)

  • This allowed me to break my newsletter into easy-to-consume sections. A main page for a summary of my findings, and then sub-pages for sections like headcount growth, user review trends, press releases/news, and web traffic updates

• PeerSignal for employee headcount changes (free)

• iSpionage for traffic and keywords (paid) but you could also use the Competitor Keyword Generator for this, which is free

• G2 & TrustRadius for review tracking (free)

I attempted this pre-ChatGPT, so all of my analysis was done manually. I bet you could use AI to help there now.

My pitch

I’d reach out to startup founders on LinkedIn and send them a newsletter with the competitive intel that I collected for free. And then if all went according to plan, each newsletter thereafter would have been $100.

Where I went wrong

Like any product or service, the people you reach out to need to believe that it’s important. But I didn’t have the patience to find these people at scale.

I’m juggling moderating a community, this newsletter, a podcast… oh yeah, and a full-time job. And I wasn’t willing to invest more time into this new project, so I bailed.

But I do think with patience and a can-do attitude, someone could make this work.

PS: I walked Patrick Campbell (Founder & CEO of ProfitWell) through one of these newsletters in my podcast interview with him to see what he thought. You can hear his live feedback at the 37:31 mark.

New Podcast: Building a Business Alternative to Excel

Bobby Pinero is the CEO & Co-Founder of Equals, the only spreadsheet with built-in connections to any database, versioning, and collaboration.

I've joked that every company's biggest competitor is Excel, so it was fun to learn how Bobby and the team at Equals are actually positioning against it.

There's a lot to learn from this interview:

• identifying best fit early adopters for your product

• how Equals is growing by acknowledging legacy spreadsheet strengths

• the approach to sub-category creation between traditional spreadsheets and BI tools

• and lots more

Advice from the Community

1,000+ messages are exchanged every month by your favorite Product Marketers in the Healthy Competition community. Here are some recent threads that got the community talking.

Not a member? Easy peasy. Just join here.

New Open Roles in Product Marketing & Competitive Intel

• Product Marketing Manager @ Mutiny

  • Comp range: $130k - $165k

• Principle Product Marketing Manager @ Docker

  • Comp range: $200k - $250k

• Product Marketing Manager, Competitive Intelligence @ Ada

  • Comp range: $74k - $104k

• Technical Product Marketing Manager @ ZoomInfo

  • Comp range: $97,600 - $122k + bonus

• Strategy Associate @ Lucid

• Product Marketing Manager Lead @ ActiveCampaign

• Product Marketing Manager, Competitive Intelligence @ Employ

Quick Tips / Examples

🥥🍍🥑 Fruity Memes 🍎🍉🫐

@healthycompetition

🥲teamwork makes the dream work #productmanager #productmanagement #productmarketing #pmm #saas #b2bmarketing #techtok #businesstok #corporatehumor

If you like this newsletter, you might also enjoy these. They’re my favs right now.

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy