mapping-markets

Mapping a market from one domain

You give it stripe.com. It reads Stripe's own pages to work out what Stripe sells, groups those products into the distinct markets they sit in, writes search queries that describe those markets without ever naming Stripe, fires them, and classifies every host that comes back.

The output is a map: companies, products, communities, publishers and directories, each with what it is, how it relates to the anchor, and why.

When you reach for this

Someone has a company and wants the shape of the world around it. "Who competes with us." "What are the alternatives to X." "Where do our buyers actually hang out." "Who writes about this space." "Give me a target list." Also when they have a company they are evaluating and want its landscape rather than its pitch.

Not for researching a single company in depth — this maps outward from one, it does not profile it.

The one idea

The catalog is written before any company name is known. The queries describe what the anchor does, never what it is called, so a look-up query is structurally impossible to write. That is why the map contains companies nobody had heard of rather than the five names already on the first page of Google.

The corollary matters when you read the output: a competitor here is something the search put next to the anchor, not something a human already knew about.

The shape of the work

Market map progress:
- [ ] 1. Credentials resolve
- [ ] 2. Agree the depth, because depth is the bill
- [ ] 3. Run it, watching the phase log
- [ ] 4. Read the map back and say what it found
- [ ] 5. Say plainly which parts to trust

Do not skip 5. See "How much to trust it" below — it is measured, not a disclaimer.

Step 1 — Credentials

Four, in a .env at the repo root:

Variable	What it is
BRIGHTDATA_API_TOKEN	Bright Data account API token
BRIGHTDATA_SERP_ZONE	name of a SERP API zone
BRIGHTDATA_UNLOCKER_ZONE	name of a Web Unlocker zone
OPENROUTER_API_KEY	LLM key. Note the key's own limit, not just the account balance