How many times have your heard someone say “that technology would be easy to build in a weekend”? My immediate response is that most technology companies aren’t successful based on their technology alone. In fact, it is a useful exercise to understand potential competitor metrics and resource allocation when thinking about getting into a market. Here are some items to consider:
- How many employees does the company have and what percentage are allocated in areas like sales and engineering (use LinkedIn to find this out)?
- Where does the company advertise and how much are they spending (do a Google search and see how high their ads rank as well as use a service like SpyFu to understand more metrics)?
- How much traffic does the site have (use compete.com, quantcast.com, and alexa.com)?
- How many Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and RSS subscribers do they have?
So, the next time you think about creating a product or pivoting into a different market, use some of these techniques to better understand competitor metrics and resource allocation.
What else? What are some other tools you use to analyze competitors?
David Cummings on Startups 
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