Competitors, mapped.
Also called: Competitive analysis · Competitor landscape · Alternatives map · Competitor teardown
Listing who else solves this problem, direct and indirect, at what price, then finding the honest gap your product can defend.
Map every alternative the buyer can choose: direct rivals, indirect substitutes, and doing nothing. Note each one’s real price. The gap you can hold is your reason to exist. Skip the do-nothing option and the map flatters you into building the wrong thing.
What reviewing competitors is
Reviewing competitors is the act of writing down every option your buyer can spend money or effort on instead of you, then describing how each one works, what it costs, and where it falls short. It is not a marketing exercise about why you win. It is an engineering exercise about what the field already does, so you can decide whether there is room for a better answer.
The buyer does not compare you against a blank page. A baker eyeing a £149 heated box is weighing it against the £15 folding fabric proofer in their basket, against the free oven-light trick they read on a forum, and against simply carrying on as they are. If your review only lists the products that look like yours, you have missed three of the four things the buyer is actually choosing between.
The three categories most teams forget
- Indirect substitutes. Anything that solves the same job a different way. For the proofing box that is the oven-with-the-light-on method, which costs nothing and works badly. Free and bad still steals sales.
- The do-nothing option. The buyer keeps binning the odd cold-kitchen loaf and accepts it. This is usually the strongest competitor and the one teams never put on the page.
- The opposite end of the price range. A £300-plus commercial proving cabinet is a competitor too, just for a different buyer. Knowing where it sits tells you who you are not for.
A worked competitor map
The clearest way to review competitors is to fill one table honestly: who, how, what price, and the gap you can defend against each. Here is the proofing box’s, the one we ran in our pilot, so you can see the shape of a real map rather than a generic template.
The map only earns its place if it is honest. Here is the difference between a review that flatters you and one you can build on.
- Only lists the £15–30 fabric proofers, then declares yourself better.
- Leaves the free oven-light method off the page.
- Pretends the do-nothing buyer does not exist.
- No prices, so no honest read on where you sit.
- Direct, indirect, and the £300-plus cabinet all named with prices.
- The free oven trick listed as the real substitute it is.
- Do-nothing on the page as the toughest competitor.
- A defensible gap stated in numbers, not adjectives.
The flattering version feels good and tells you nothing. The honest map tells you exactly which buyer is yours, what you must beat, and the one price band where you have room to stand.
How it fits the bigger picture
Review Competitors is activity 04.10.01 in the framework, the first activity of Stage 04 Evaluate. It feeds straight into analyse market (04.10.02), which takes the rivals you have just mapped and sizes the demand around them.
What it can do
It shows you the full field of alternatives the buyer is choosing between, with real prices attached, and names the gap you can defend. Done honestly, it is the cheapest way to find out, before you spend on tooling, that the field already has your idea covered.
What it can’t do
It can’t size the demand or prove the gap is worth money. That is what analyse market does next. A gap on the competitor map is a hypothesis about an opening, not a confirmed market.
See the full 10-stage process →
Try it yourself
List every option your buyer can pick instead of you, including doing nothing. Put a real price next to each one, even if it is £0. Note honestly what each does well and badly. Then write the single gap you can defend, in numbers. If you can’t, you haven’t found your reason to exist yet. Start the Free Sprint →
Your competitor-review checklist
Project notes: the gap nobody owned
▸ From the notebook · optional reading
Mapping the proofing box’s rivals with Dan and Anna Hartley in Stockport, and the free competitor that nearly killed the whole idea.
3 min read · click to open
Dan opened the session convinced there were no competitors. “Nobody makes a heated ceramic box for home bakers.” True, and also the wrong frame. I asked him to forget what looked like his product and instead list everything a baker could spend money or effort on to fix a failing overnight prove.
What ended up on the map
Direct. Folding fabric proofers on Amazon, £15–30. We ordered two and tested them. They hold no useful temperature in a cold kitchen, which is the whole job, but they are a fifth of our price and that matters to the buyer.
Indirect. The oven-light method. Free, all over the forums, and genuinely used by serious bakers. It drifts past 26°C and locks up the oven, but free is a powerful price.
Do-nothing. The one Dan had not counted. Most bakers just accept the odd binned loaf, roughly £4 of flour and a wasted night. We pushed hard on this one because it is the rival that does not advertise.
The far end. Commercial proving cabinets at £300-plus. Built for a bakery, far too big for a worktop. They told us who we were not for.
Where the map earned its keep
The honest read stung at first. The free oven trick and the do-nothing buyer were the real threats, not other products. For an afternoon it looked like there was no room. Then the gap showed itself: nothing between £30 and £300 held 26°C ±0.5°C overnight, sat happily on a worktop, and asked for no app. That empty middle band, in numbers, became the £149 positioning we carried all the way to launch.
If we had only listed the fabric proofers and declared ourselves better, we would have missed that the buyer’s real default is free. The map’s job was to make us argue against free, not against a cheaper box.
— Evaluate stage, project notes, 2026
— Next in Evaluate → Analyse market