Hiring radar
A competitor's hiring radar is a roadmap leak. A surge of engineering roles in one area is a product bet; a sales-team build-out is a go-to-market push. You read their strategy by what they staff for.
A competitor research tool and market research for startups in one file. Size a rival, map the landscape and scout partners from the public record — no $20k report, no week of tabs.
Founders need competitive and market intelligence constantly and can almost never justify the cost of buying it. You're asked the "how big is the market and who else is in it" question by every investor, you need to know what a competitor just shipped, and you have to decide which partnership is worth chasing — all while building the actual product. The classic competitor research tool is a paid analyst report that's stale on arrival, or a junior teammate burning a week in browser tabs.
A dossier is market research for startups that you run yourself, in minutes. Point it at a competitor and read their team shape, hiring momentum, funding, tech stack and the customers and partners they've announced. Run it across a category and you've built a market map. Point it at a potential partner and you've scouted them before the first call. It's the strategy work you keep meaning to do, made cheap enough to actually do.
These five sections turn a competitor name into a strategy input you can act on.
A competitor's hiring radar is a roadmap leak. A surge of engineering roles in one area is a product bet; a sales-team build-out is a go-to-market push. You read their strategy by what they staff for.
Their money trail tells you how much runway they are playing with and what they will be expected to do with it. A rival's fresh raise changes how aggressively you should move.
The tech fingerprint shows what a competitor or a prospective partner is built on — useful for sizing their capabilities, finding integration angles, and judging whether a partnership is technically realistic.
The relationship web names their customers, partners and rivals — the fastest way to map a market, find unclaimed segments, and spot partners who already work with companies like yours.
The news timeline lays out launches and milestones in order, so you can see a competitor's trajectory at a glance and time your own moves against theirs.
The same file works for sizing one rival or charting a whole category.
Start with the competitor that keeps coming up in sales calls. Pull their file and read it end to end.
Their relationship web names the next companies to look at — adjacent players, shared customers, partners. Run files on those too.
Compare hiring and news across the set. Where everyone is staffing up is where the market is heading.
You now have a sourced landscape — leaders, challengers, white space — to put in a deck or a board update without paying for a report.
For partnership scouting, the workflow inverts: pull a dossier on a potential partner and you walk into the conversation knowing their stack, their customers and whether they are growing — so you can frame the partnership around something real. And when you are fundraising, running a file on yourself is a sharp way to see exactly what an investor will find when they screen you.
For the market-landscape and competitor slides, yes — it is sourced public data you can cite. Treat figures like market size as directional and verify the load-bearing numbers, but the team, funding and positioning picture is solid first-draft material.
It is fresh on demand instead of stale on arrival, it is free, and you can run it on any company you want — including the niche rivals no analyst covers. You give up a polished narrative; you gain speed, breadth and the ability to re-run it whenever something changes.
Yes. Run the file before the first call to read their tech stack, customer base and growth. You will know whether the partnership is technically realistic and worth your time before you spend any of it.
one file per rival. the landscape, sourced.