Research · v2.0.0 · featured

Competitive Research Desk

A research agent that refuses vague ‘the market is growing’ slides. You drop a URL, a product name, or a one-line idea. It returns a print-ready desk: five-bullet market snapshot, a table of 6–10 named competitors with positioning and threat, whitespace you can actually build, and a 7-day research plan with sources. Built for founders who have one afternoon, not a McKinsey retainer.

war.room · 14,823 votes · 86,592 score · 42,123 opens

#market#competitors#briefing#war-room

Spec

Build a Competitive Research Desk — a shippable research app, not a chatbot with a table.

PRODUCT
A single-sitting war room. The user pastes a product, company, category, or URL. The app produces a structured competitive landscape they can print or paste into a board memo. Default to honesty: if a price is not public, say so. If a rival is a guess, tag it GUESSED.

WHO IT IS FOR
Founders, PMs, and agency strategists who currently dump ten tabs into a Google Doc.

JOB TO BE DONE
In under three minutes, answer: who actually competes, where they make money, and where a wedge still exists.

SCREENS
1. Intake — one large paste field (product / URL / thesis), optional “geography” and “price band” chips, a Run desk button. Keyboard: Cmd/Ctrl+Enter submits.
2. War room — four stacked modules on desktop, accordion on mobile:
   a. Snapshot: 5 bullets, each ≤22 words. No slogans.
   b. Field table: 6–10 rows. Columns: name, one-line positioning, public pricing (or “unlisted”), channel (PLG / sales / marketplace), threat (high / med / low) with a 8-word why.
   c. Whitespace: exactly three opportunities. Each has: the gap, who it hurts, a 14-day ship test.
   d. 7-day plan: Mon–Sun, one research action per day, each with a source type (filing, pricing page, review cluster, job board, changelog).
3. Sources drawer — every claim that has a URL. Claims without a URL are marked UNVERIFIED in faint type. Never invent a citation.
4. Export — copy as Markdown, copy as plain text, print (CSS print stylesheet). No PDF library in Phase 1.

DATA
- Last 8 desks in localStorage (id, query, createdAt, snapshot JSON).
- No accounts. No share links in Phase 1.

EMPTY / ERROR / LOADING
- Empty: a worked example (“Linear vs issue trackers”) the user can load in one click.
- Loading: module skeletons with a monospace ticker “pulling public pages…”, never a spinner-only void.
- Failure: keep the query, show what was retrieved vs what failed, offer “run with weaker sources”.
- Zero competitors found: say so, then list adjacent categories to try.

VISUAL DIRECTION
Phosphor-on-paper terminal. IBM Plex Mono for data, IBM Plex Sans for prose. Dense, print-ready, 1px rules, no cards-in-cards, no hero illustration, no stock photography, no purple, no emoji, no gradients. Threat-high rows get a left rule in the accent color — not a red badge rainbow.

INTERACTIONS
- Click a competitor name to expand a 4-line dossier (audience, obvious tell, likely weakness, source).
- Sort table by threat or by pricing.
- “Kill the fluff” toggle strips adverbs and banned words: unlock, seamless, elevate, supercharge, landscape, ecosystem, revolutionary.

OUT OF SCOPE
Live web crawl dashboards, CRM sync, PDF export libraries, multi-user, comments, real-time collab, charts that require a charting SDK if a table will do.

ACCEPTANCE
- A stranger can paste “Mercury banking” and get named rivals, not “fintech players”.
- At least one UNVERIFIED tag appears when a price is unknown — prove the honesty path.
- Print view is readable in black and white.
- Mobile: intake first, modules stacked, no horizontal overflow, 44px tap targets.