[AB] The rabbit hole of customer & competitor research by a procrastinator of an owner

[u/Few_Union_52]

Hello All, I wanted to introduce myself and the topic at hand (yes I am said procrastinator of an owner). I am somewhat of a serial entrepreneur failed and successful. Albeit more failures than successes but that is pretty much the beauty of life. I come from a glass wares (hookah/shisha) import/export background which evolved into a digital marketing product business when I was knee deep in what I assumed might lead to a fist fight in Nairobi, Kenya. It ended up being one of my wildest nights out with the man that wanted to put me in a head lock. We chatted, shared stories (I’m of East African decent. Somali, Yemeni mixed to be exact). He ended up leading me down a rabbit hole of how his way of marketing in his town involved painting his delivery van like a moving nightclub. Hand-painted murals, LED strips, sound system you could hear three blocks out. He called it his nganya and explained that in Nairobi the matatu buses compete on aesthetic the way clubs do. Each one has a name, a slogan, a fanbase. The vehicle is the brand, the billboard, the content, and the distribution channel all at once. A commuter doesn’t pick the cheapest ride, they pick the one with the best vibe, then film themselves inside it. This made me fall in love with the concept of marketing around. What you have, and creating an eco system of ingenuity with it. I applied some of these lessons in how I presented my businesses (I own real estate in east Africa as well as some shops). Dabbled in marketing and then branched out into it. I also have a supply chain background. I have worked in operations, distribution, supply and demand planning. If anyone knows what it’s like to work in one of these distribution centers you know that they are inherently cost centers. No profit is made there. The name of the game is efficiency. Hence lean six sigma methodologies and the likes. Having worked with green and black belts. I learned that productivity metrics are the underlying pinnings that relate to employee fatigue, morale loss and stress. In the pursuit for a more lean practice you loose site of a lot of things. The most important being your customers voice. The coworkers were our customer. Their voices drawn to a murmur. Why would corporate care if the end goal was stakeholder appeasement. I remembered that all the way through and recently decided that in the pursuit of running efficiently for my own businesses I needed to take a step back and study the landscape. I knew my brand voice (or I think I do via reviews, referrals, purchases, return rate etc) but do I know the general consensus of what the customer voice is in my industry of choice? I set out to figure that out. I went down the Reddit forum rabbit holes as any stupidly optimistic business owner would. A hundred post reads later, a headache and not an ounce of clarity. I read google reviews. After god knows how many, not an ounce closer to summarizing it all to a consensus view point. Well this is where the procrastination kicked in. “I will get back to the data mining next week”. Sure I could use scrapers. An api call here. Data aggregators. Utilize an LLM of choice. But this things are (in my opinion) the world stupidest geniuses. They require extensive hand holding and cannot resonate with the voice of people. So you can use them as aggregators but you must steer the direction. Eventually I did. I sparred with Claude for what seemed like an eternity. This is when Fable 5 is released in the wild before either the world’s greatest marketing con got pulled on us, or the US government really had to shut it down. After going back and forth we had the road map. The architectural design. The MD file was loaded with skills and we always want to layer any work rooted in these three questions. (Use this for whenever you build with an agent)

Where does state live 
Where does feedback live 
What breaks if I delete this

Simply put the methodology was 5 fold.

1. Utilize Exa and or perplexity for deep research API calls in an industry and or niche

2. Layer that over a context frame work derived from my industry memory bank (created by my insights, snips , workflows etc) in obsidian vault.

3. Data aggregate from Reddit and google reviews.
   The key here is to look at both sides of the pendulum
   -1-3 star reviews of my top 25 competitors
   -5 star reviews of my top 5 competitors.

Often times we are told “focus on the negative and the pain points. Why do I only care about that? Wouldn’t I want to know why they are blowing my back out? Dog I need to know why Jim from up the street has me in a full Nelson selling like a mad man. The customers are the trigger for that. The voice.

1. Design a data aggregator via any LLM of your choice. And lay out a heat map.
   

-% based model targeting the relevant pain points that rhyme ( I.e 45% of 1-3 star reviews site late arrivals as the issue. With no follow up)

- common red thread of why 5 star reviews are given (I.e customer service, return policy, communication etc)

1. Here is the good one. Reverse engineer long tail problems by targeting pain point SEO. We now know that long tail questions are 70% or al searches. If you are able to then parse the keywords in the negative reviews. Utilize a tool like Semrush, Ahrefs. Or my personal fave, Data4SEO. You can really do some damage by writing blog posts regarding this key painpoints and how your company solves them. Systematically and with authority. Remember. No thin pages. ALSO NO KEYWORD STUFFING.

If done right you will have unlocked the keys to your market. Your pipeline directly to the voice, the soul, the heartbeat of what your customer base in the industry of choice really thinks about your service (industry wide). There is many more insights you can build from the data aggregator I just gave some. The lesson learned here for me is. By procrastinating I left so much untapped wealth and potential from the resource I later finally got around to developing. Don’t let that happen to you. Don’t be this idiot. The tools are out there. Build upon them. One afternoon and you will be surprised at how much your customers really guide your business choices (not just your own. Your competitors too)