Execution is the key: 5 Simple ideas to track your competition

One of the key elements for a startup is to know its environment composed among others of competitors (direct or not). It is very hard to get intelligence on what a startup is doing for obvious reasons: the company is young and has very little public track record.

I am asked so often about that question that i decided to disclose some tricks i used (not all of them of course) over the years and that prove successful (i am saving you the obvious stuff like reading their blog, tracking technorati, reading news....)

• Who are your competitor: 7/10 people i met don't know their competition. If you don't know who they are you should and to find that use internet directories like BuzzShout or museum of Modern Betas. This is usually not enough. find blog posts about one of them, usually in comments you'll find way more (check any random post on TechCrunch for example)
• Get Analytics: do not stop at Alexa that is not reliable and even wrong most of the time. Get free alternatives like compete or quantcast. The best data is from Nielsen Comscore or Hitwise. This data is not free. So one tip: track their blogs, they are full of free public data.
• Track job boards: the startup page but also major vertical job boards (check out crunchboard, amazing how much you can learn from it) so you can see if they recruit (usually a good sign) and what kind of skills they need to build their company
• Attend conferences attended by your competitor: usually they will gladly share presentation if they sponsor including details. If you can't go there check out the video podcasts or slide presentation available on the net
• Meet them: this is often the most obvious and less used approach. A competitor is not an enemy and they will probably answer positively to a request for meeting. Of course you won't talk about your respective business plans. But if you have a good intuition you can guess a lot of good stuff out of it.

All those tricks are free and can be used right away. There is a lot more ways to find out very specific infos. I could share them, but then i would have to kill you :)