The Next Input — Issue #095

The AI That Tracks Your Competition

Author

Aaron Bost
December 03, 2025

In partnership with

Warning Season 3 GIF by The Simpsons

⚡ The Briefing-60 sec

🛠️ The Playbook — The Competitor Radar Engine

Mission Automate daily competitor tracking so trends, new launches, and strategic moves hit your desk instantly—without doing the manual digging.
Difficulty Medium
Build time 2–3 hours
ROI Saves 5–10 hours a week and gives you early warning on market shifts.

0) Why This Matters

Competition is moving faster than ever. New models, new tools, new pricing—by the time an article hits your feed, the next move is already in play.
A competitor engine flips your workflow from reactive → anticipatory.
Instead of “Oh damn, they launched something,” you get: “We knew this was coming last week.”

1) Architecture

Component

Tool

Purpose

Monitors

Perplexity / ScraperAPI

Pull headlines, updates, filings

Classifier

Claude 4.5 Haiku

Identify type of move (pricing, product, hiring, infra)

Theme Engine

GPT-5-mini

Group events into insights

Memory Layer

Airtable

Store competitor cards + timelines

Delivery

Slack digest

Daily or weekly brief

2) Workflow

  1. Build a list of competitor sources: blogs, PR, LinkedIn, filings, feeds.

  2. Perplexity scrapes all sources twice daily and extracts newest updates.

  3. Claude 4.5 Haiku tags each update:

    • pricing shift

    • model upgrade

    • partnership

    • infra expansion

    • layoffs

    • funding

  4. GPT-5-mini groups similar events and forms “signals”:

    • multiple hires → expansion

    • multiple GPU buys → scaling

    • sudden layoffs → strategic contraction

  5. Airtable logs each signal on a competitor’s timeline.

  6. Slack sends you a clean competitor radar brief at 8am.

3) Example Prompts

Classification Prompt (Claude 4.5 Haiku)

Classify this update:
- pricing change
- product launch
- partnership
- infrastructure expansion
- leadership/hiring
- layoffs
- funding
Return the category and a one-sentence summary.

Insight Builder Prompt (GPT-5-mini)

Combine these updates into 2–3 clear insights.
Highlight:
- what changed
- who is affected
- why it matters
Tone: clean and confident.

4) Guardrails

  • Don’t treat hype posts as strategic moves—verify before logging.

  • Remove duplicate sources to avoid noise.

  • Don’t over-group weak signals; wait for patterns.

  • No storing paywalled data unless legally allowed.

5) Pilot Rollout — 3 hours

  1. Build the competitor list in Airtable.

  2. Connect Perplexity to scrape each source.

  3. Run 20 recent updates through the classifier.

  4. Have GPT-5-mini group them into insights.

  5. Generate the first “Competitor Radar” brief manually.

  6. If clean → automate the daily Slack delivery.

6) Metrics

  • Number of signals captured per week

  • Time saved vs manual monitoring

  • Early-warnings surfaced before public announcements

  • Percentage of false positives

  • Stakeholder engagement (reads/clicks on slack digest)

Pro Tip: Add a “confidence” column. Over time you’ll see which competitors bluff and which actually move.

🎯 The Arsenal — Tools & Prompts

Copy-paste prompt block:

You are my competitor intelligence engine.
Turn raw updates into:
- categories
- 2–3 strategic insights
- clear implications
Tone: sharp and business-focused.

💡 Free Office Hours

Want help implementing anything? Book a free 15-minute Office Hours slot—no sales pitch, just workflows solved.

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🕹️ Game Over

Know the moves before they hit the headlines.

— Aaron Automating the boring. Amplifying the brilliant.