Always-on customer-pain and competitor research
Voice-of-customer intelligence, on autopilot
It reads what customers say in their own words — across forums, review sites, online groups, and video — and watches what competitors are quietly doing, then writes it up. Every week, on its own, instead of once a year by hand.
A research team's once-a-year sprint → a continuous loop one person runs every week.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| How often it runs | once or twice a year, if at all | weekly for customer pain, monthly for competitors |
| Effort per round | days to weeks of manual reading and tagging | set up a profile once, then collect the report |
| What you get back | a stale snapshot | a live feed of real quotes and competitor moves |
| Cost to run again | another full sprint | near zero — the engine just runs |
| Serving more than one company | a whole new project each time | swap one settings file |
A slow, expensive, manual sprint became a standing capability that costs almost nothing to run again — and the same engine serves a different company by swapping one profile file. Intelligence that used to be a once-a-year snapshot is now a live feed: you catch a competitor's price change or a wave of a specific complaint the week it happens, not the quarter after. The kind of market awareness that normally takes a funded research team now runs from one person and a folder of settings.
What I built
A research engine that does the reading, scoring, and writing that normally takes a market-research team. It isn't an app anyone logs into — it runs as a shared engine (search, extract, dedupe, report) with a small profile file per company holding that company's competitors, search terms, target customers, and the categories of pain to watch for. To serve a different company, you swap the profile, not the engine.
- What customers actually say. It mines real customer quotes from forums, review sites, online groups, and video — and from the company's own feedback surveys and support tickets — tags each by theme and sentiment, and links every quote back to its source so you can check it. Built on the data store the company already ran, instead of an expensive specialist license.
- Always-on pain and competitor tracking. Agents that run on their own keep mining customer pain and watching a named set of competitors, surfacing buying signals as they appear and a monthly log of what each competitor changed.
- Quotes turned into copy. A year of open-ended survey answers, mined into the raw material for a landing page aimed at one specific kind of customer — written in words customers actually used.
- Competitor ad intelligence. A tool that collects competitors' ads and "reads" the images, then writes up the gaps worth attacking and turns them into creative briefs.
Each cycle the engine searches, pulls and scores quotes, drops anything it has seen before, and writes a report ready to hand to sales and marketing.
Why it matters
The payoff is awareness that stays current. Instead of a once-a-year snapshot that's stale before it's read, the team gets a live feed — they catch a competitor's price change or a surge of a specific complaint in the week it happens, not the quarter after. Speed is the obvious part; the real unlock is cadence and reach. Because the whole thing is driven by a small settings file, one person can run it for many companies at once, and the customer quotes flow straight into sales calls, landing-page copy, and roadmap calls — the signal moving to where decisions actually get made, continuously.
Normally, "always-on customer and competitor intelligence" describes a funded software product with a research team behind it. Here it's one operator and a folder of settings, running on tools the company already owned.
- 01Search
The system searches forums, review sites, online groups, and video for what customers are saying about the product and its category — all sources at once.
- 02Extract
It pulls out the actual customer quotes and scores each one for how urgent the pain is and how close that person sounds to buying.
- 03Watch
It tracks named competitors for changes in pricing, features, messaging, and hiring, and logs what moved.
- 04Dedupe
It throws out anything it has already seen, so each report is only what's new since last time.
- 05Report
It writes a clean summary ready to drop straight into a sales call, a landing page, or a roadmap decision.
The shift here is from snapshot to live feed: the same questions a research team answers once a year now get answered every week, by one person, at almost no cost to run again. Customer pain and competitor moves land where decisions get made — in sales calls, landing-page copy, and the roadmap — while they're still fresh enough to act on.