Verified against Claude · 2026-08-04
Map a competitive landscape by how customers actually choose, not a feature checklist
Places every competitor — including the status-quo and DIY options a feature matrix always leaves out — on the two axes customers actually weigh, then writes one honestly-checked differentiation sentence.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
You are a competitive strategy analyst. Build a landscape analysis organized around how the customer actually decides, not a generic feature checklist that treats every capability as equally decision-relevant.
CONTEXT
Startup one-liner: AI-assisted intake triage for urgent care clinics
Direct competitors (same solution type, same customer): TriageIQ, FastTrackHealth
Indirect or substitute solutions (different approach, same underlying job — including doing nothing or DIY): Front-desk staff doing manual triage, a generic EHR intake form, an outsourced nurse triage line
What customers actually weigh when choosing, if known: Clinics care most about staff time saved during peak hours, much less about upfront cost
COMPLETENESS CHECK
Confirm the direct-vs-indirect grouping is actually complete before analyzing it. Explicitly check whether "doing nothing" or a manual/DIY workaround belongs in the indirect list even if it wasn't named — status-quo inertia is usually the real biggest competitor for an early-stage startup, and a landscape analysis that skips it is analyzing the wrong fight.
DECISION AXES
Identify the two axes customers actually weigh when choosing between these options, using Clinics care most about staff time saved during peak hours, much less about upfront cost if given, or inferring the two axes most likely to drive a real switching decision if not. State your reasoning for choosing them — do not default to generic axes like "price vs. features" unless the input genuinely supports that being the real decision.
PLACEMENT
Place every competitor plus AI-assisted intake triage for urgent care clinics on those two axes as a text-described grid — which quadrant, and one sentence of reasoning per placement, tied to something specific about how that option actually operates, not a vibe.
DIFFERENTIATION CHECK
Write one honest differentiation sentence: what this startup is the only, best, or most credible option for. If the notes don't yet support a real differentiation claim, say so directly instead of writing a vague one ("more affordable and easier to use") that any competitor in the list could also truthfully claim about itself.
OUTPUT FORMAT
Four headed sections: Completeness Check, Decision Axes (with reasoning), Placement Grid, Differentiation Check.Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Feature-matrix comparisons fail for a specific reason: they compare capabilities, not the actual axes a buyer weighs when choosing, so two products can look identical on a checklist and still lose or win on an axis the checklist never captured at all — setup time, staff trust, or switching risk rarely appear as rows on a feature grid, yet they're often what actually decides the sale. Forcing status-quo and DIY into the indirect set corrects a documented and specific blind spot: founders reflexively list only named competing companies, even though for most early-stage products the real dominant competitor is 'the customer keeps doing it manually,' since a familiar, imperfect workaround beats an unfamiliar, unproven product more often than any named rival ever does. Refusing to write a generic differentiation sentence when the facts don't support one guards against exactly the kind of positioning claim — 'faster, cheaper, easier' — that every competitor in the set could also truthfully make, which means it functions as noise rather than a real reason to choose, to anyone evaluating more than one option side by side. Requiring the two decision axes to be inferred from what customers actually weigh, rather than defaulted from a generic price-versus-features template, also protects against the single most common shortcut in a landscape analysis: picking axes that make the founder's own product look good in the top-right quadrant by construction, instead of axes that reflect what the buyer in {{customer_decision_criteria}} is actually optimizing for when nobody's watching.
Verified against
Claude Sonnet 5 · 2026-08-04
Changelog
- 2026-08-04 — Initial publish, verified against Claude Sonnet 5.
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