Competitive Analysis

Why Study Competitors?

User interviews tell you about your own product's problems, but they rarely reveal the full landscape of alternatives your users are comparing you against. Competitive analysis is the discipline of systematically studying other products, direct and indirect, to understand where you are strong, where you are exposed, and where genuine white space remains.

A PM at Moniepoint is not only competing with other POS providers, they are competing with cash itself, and with informal savings groups ("ajo" or "esusu"). A PM at Spotify competes not just with Apple Music, but with YouTube, radio, and silence. Good competitive analysis widens the lens beyond the obvious rivals.

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Direct vs Indirect Competitors

• Direct competitors solve the same problem the same way. For a Nigerian digital bank, this might be Kuda vs Opay vs Access Bank's digital products.
• Indirect competitors solve the same problem a different way. For a savings app, an indirect competitor is a traditional "ajo" contribution group, or simply keeping cash under a mattress.
• Substitute behaviours are what people do when no product exists at all. Before food delivery apps like Chowdeck existed, the substitute was calling a restaurant directly or sending a driver.

Ignoring indirect competitors and substitutes is a common mistake — they often represent the largest share of the market you are trying to win.

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A Simple Framework: Feature, Price, Experience, Positioning

When comparing competitors, structure the analysis across four dimensions:

Example: comparing Paystack and Flutterwave as payment gateways, both offer similar core features (cards, transfers, USSD), but they have historically positioned differently — one leaning heavily into developer experience and documentation, the other into breadth of markets and enterprise reach. Understanding positioning, not just features, tells you where the real competitive battle is being fought.

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Running a Competitive Teardown

A practical process:

1. List every alternative, including direct, indirect, and "do nothing" substitutes.
2. Use the product yourself. Sign up, complete the core flow (e.g. send money, book a ride), and take screenshots. There is no substitute for hands-on use.
3. Read public signals. App store reviews, Trustpilot, and social media complaints reveal real pain points competitors have not solved.
4. Map strengths and gaps against your own product using the four-dimension framework above.
5. Look for white space — a real, unmet need that no competitor addresses well.

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Positioning: Claiming Your Space

Positioning is the answer to: "For [target customer], who [has this need], our product is the [category] that [key benefit], unlike [main alternative]."

For example: "For small Nigerian merchants who need to accept card and transfer payments without a website, Paystack's payment links are a checkout solution that works instantly, unlike building a custom e-commerce integration."

Good positioning is sharpened, not diluted, by competitive analysis. It tells you exactly which claims are already owned by someone else, and which are genuinely open.

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The Trap of Copying Competitors

Competitive analysis should inform your thinking, not replace your own user research. A common failure mode is "feature parity chasing" — building whatever a competitor just launched, without asking whether your own users actually need it. Slack did not win by copying every feature of enterprise chat tools that came before it; it won by focusing obsessively on making team communication feel lightweight and fun, a positioning gap its competitors had left wide open.

Use competitive analysis to understand the landscape and avoid blind spots — but let your own research define what you actually build.