market-scan

Market scan (keep your read current)

Positioning rots. The competitor you sized up six months ago has since rebranded, raised, repriced, or renamed the category. This is the habit that keeps your brief honest about the world outside it.

Use this when: a rival just rebranded or repositioned, a new tool is getting attention in your space, your docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md competitor answers are more than a quarter old, or you just have the feeling the ground moved and your messaging is answering last year's market.

The core idea

Your docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md captured the market as it was the day you wrote it. Markets don't hold still. A scan re-checks the outside world against your brief and surfaces the deltas: what changed, and which changes actually threaten or help your positioning. Most don't matter. The scan's job is to find the two or three that do, not to produce a competitor spreadsheet.

Before you start: can your agent see the web?

• If your agent can browse or search the web, it runs the scan for real: competitor homepages, changelogs, pricing pages, launch posts, and recent discussion.
• If it can't, it runs the scan as an interview: it asks what you've noticed and where, and you paste in the pages. Same output, you're the browser. Say which mode you're in up front.

How to run this (for the agent)

• Start from the brief. Read docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md: the rivals ("what do they use instead"), the "why you", the villain, and the current positioning line. That's your baseline to compare against.
• Scan the named rivals first, then the category. For each competitor in the brief, check: homepage headline and positioning, pricing, any rebrand or renamed category, funding or acquisition, and new capabilities that erase the founder's wedge. Then scan for new entrants and category-level shifts (a term everyone suddenly uses, a platform move, an AI or agent shift).
• Report deltas, not descriptions. Do not summarize each competitor. Say what changed since the brief, and for each change, whether it strengthens, threatens, or is irrelevant to the founder's positioning. Rank by "does this move our position."
• Tie every real change to an action. A rival adopting the founder's language means the wedge is eroding: route to positioning-and-story. A new pricing norm means revisit market-to-devs-sell-to-buyers. A dead competitor means an opening. No action, no reason to flag it.
• Update the brief and roadmap. Rewrite the affected lines in docs/gtm-cofounder/founder-brief.md (rivals, why-you, villain, positioning) with today's reality and the date, and add any positioning move it triggers to docs/gtm-cofounder/gtm-roadmap.md. Keep the tags honest: a competitor's public claim is [assumption] until you have checked it is real.