Competitor voice

Rival Watch reads what your competitors' customers say about them on LinkedIn: the complaints, feature requests, switching stories, questions, praise, and the caveats buried in that praise ("love it, only wish it..."). You name up to fifteen rival products once. Your agent finds each one's website and LinkedIn page, reads what customers write, keeps only posts truly about that product, and returns one hosted report. Every line is a word-for-word quote with a link.

What it does

What it costs

$20.00 per sweep, the same for every sweep, however many rivals are on the list (up to fifteen) and however much it reads. Your agent shows the price before it runs. The list, the page previews, the report, its JSON and its CSV are free. A failed sweep is refunded. A sweep of an unchanged list within four hours of the last one is refused, not charged, and you get the existing report link. Every charge and refund is a line in your wallet activity.

Start: hand this page to your agent

For the desktop app 0.6.10 or newer.

Copy this page's link and send it to your agent. It activates the cloud tool under Requires, after telling you the price, and then follows the steps below with you. The tool works at once. Only if the setup says a restart is required: click your name at the bottom left, choose Agent, open This device → Runtime and click Restart engine. You can also Activate Rival Watch by hand from the Marketplace. It reads public LinkedIn only and never uses your account, cookies or login.

Requires

• Cloud tools: rival-watch

Before you start

Two things make or break the first sweep:

• One or two sentences on what you sell. The plain thing: who it is for and what it does. Rival Watch uses it to tell your rivals apart from same-named companies, and to write the "so what" line under each pain the whole field shares.
• The rival names, with a website where you have one. Fifteen at most. Name the product, not the parent company, when a large company sells many things.

Names are often shared: a product called "Orbit" shares its name with a dozen companies. Rival Watch never guesses. A rival it cannot match to a page with confidence comes back unresolved, and your agent shows you the candidates.

Step 1 · Name your rivals

Edit the list any time; the report link never changes. You can pause a rival to keep its evidence for later, or remove it and ask to purge its evidence.

Step 2 · Confirm the pages

Step 3 · Sweep

The one paid step. Ten to twenty-five minutes for a full list.

For each rival, the sweep reads posts that mention the product (a year back on the first sweep, unless you choose a week, a month or three months), the company's own page, posts that tag it, and the comment threads under the busiest posts. Each post is judged against that product's description: is it about this product, is the author a real user, and what kind of signal is it. Complaints get a second check that assumes they are wrong until shown otherwise. Praise gets a pass that pulls out the caveats. If many different authors share the same paid-partnership footer, the rival is flagged as running a creator campaign.

Step 4 · Read the report

The report opens with the numbers behind it (posts read, posts actually about a rival, complaints that passed the check, caveats found in praise), then:

• What the whole field is blamed for. Complaints that repeat across rivals, with quotes, links, and a positioning line your product could own.
• What the field is loved for. What you have to match or reframe.
• Per rival: where it hurts and what users love, as themes with a count of distinct people, a "so what" line and up to five quotes. Caveats from praise are marked said in passing. A rival running a paid creator campaign says so at the top, and sponsored quotes are badged.
• Thin or silent rivals: too few voices to cluster yet, or none on LinkedIn.
• Every source: the full evidence table, filterable, also as a CSV.

Count people, not volume. A theme from one person is one person's experience. The caveats are often the best part: customers of well-marketed products rarely post complaints, they post praise with a "but".

Step 5 · Every week

What it refuses to do

• Guess a company page. A rival is pinned only when its page passes the product test; otherwise it stays unresolved and you decide.
• Count a namesake. A same-named company, a common word or a person with that name does not count.
• Count the vendor. Posts by the company, its staff, resellers and paid creators are marked and kept out of the praise.
• Invent a theme. A theme exists only if it cites real sources, and its people count is computed from those sources in code.
• Paraphrase a quote. Quotes are word for word, with the link.
• Ship a hollow report. If the judging step fails for a large share of posts, the sweep fails and is refunded.

What to do with it

• Positioning and copy. The "so what" lines are written against what you sell: a fast route to a landing-page section or an email angle built on a real, quoted frustration.
• Sales calls. A rival's where it hurts list is the prep sheet for a deal where that rival is the incumbent.
• Outbound. Customers complaining about a rival in public are also leads: their posts can seed Engagement Miner, and the quotes give Email Drafter proof points that are true.