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Ask HN: What tools do you use to discover competitors?

by flippyhead on 5/30/25, 2:21 PM with 10 comments

Yeah yeah I know, don't be too obsessed with competition but also, when I have some new dumb idea I first buy the domain and then... I always want to get a sense of the competative landscape and market.

What tools do you use to quickly find most competitors to a given idea?

  • by constantinum on 6/1/25, 5:29 AM

    Review aggregation websites like G2 and Trustpilot. SEO/Advertisement research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. A simple search for "something alternative" on Google search.

    https://www.g2.com/

    https://www.trustpilot.com/

    https://ahrefs.com/blog/competitive-analysis-guide/

  • by PaulHoule on 5/30/25, 2:45 PM

    Seems like it could be a good application of semantic search.

    Years ago, before BERT and all that, I worked on a search engine for patents where you could give it a paragraph describing an invention and it would use a combination of document embeddings and probability-based full text search to find matching patent and non-patent literature.

    Today's embeddings (see SBERT) are much better than what we had back then and I bet if you had a database of company descriptions, maybe articles about them, you could write a paragraph about your business and find competitors.

  • by flippyhead on 6/1/25, 4:52 PM

    I keep expecting to find something that does this but never have so I tried my hand at building one https://already.dev

  • by uticus on 5/30/25, 2:22 PM

    Follow the customers. Hopefully you have thought about customer desires etc before production - that provides a starting point.

  • by nimzoLarsen on 5/30/25, 2:24 PM

    Searching on Reddit, twitter, product hunt

  • by Oras on 5/30/25, 2:40 PM

    - SpyFu

    - ChatGPT and Perplexity DeepResearch.

  • by brudgers on 5/30/25, 7:26 PM

    Talking to your customers?

    There are no competitors for ideas.

    Only for execution.

    Good luck.