Competition is a curriculum
Open Perplexity and list the ten loudest competitors: tools, agencies, newsletters, creators. Note pricing pages, onboarding, and what they brag about. Brags reveal insecurity. Gaps reveal opportunity.
Use Exa to find long-tail pages — comparison posts, "alternative to X" articles, angry changelogs. Those pages are maps of dissatisfaction. Screenshot pricing tables. Note free tiers that feel like traps.
Watch how they talk in public
Follow three competitors on X or LinkedIn with Typefully drafts ready. Do not copy. Catalog hooks that get replies. Your future content calendar needs patterns, not plagiarism.
Write a one-page "enemy memo": what they do well, what they ignore, and the wedge you will own for ninety days. Keep it ugly and honest. Strategy decks that look pretty usually lie.
Choose a wedge you can defend
Your wedge might be speed, niche language, a tighter workflow, or a format competitors hate (templates, audits, weekly live teardown). Wedges die when you try to be universal again. Stay narrow until cash flow argues otherwise.
Running tip: update the enemy memo monthly. If a competitor ships your wedge, either deepen it or move. Standing still is how kingdoms fall.
Field notes
Field note: incumbents are rarely evil. They are busy. Busy companies leave edges: worse onboarding for a sub-niche, slow support, generic copy. Your job is to pick one edge and become unbearable to ignore there.
Screenshot their pricing every month. Price moves are strategy signals. So are quiet removals from feature pages.
Operator checklist
Operator checklist: make a folder of ten competitor screenshots — homepage, pricing, onboarding email if you can get one. Annotate each with one compliment and one insult. Compliments teach. Insults become wedges.
Write the enemy memo in under four hundred words. If it is longer, you are collecting trivia. Strategy should fit on a phone screen.
Choose the ninety-day wedge and put it in the landing page headline draft even before the site exists. The wedge is the story.
How to run it this week
Build a swipe file of onboarding emails and pricing pages. Do not copy. Annotate. What promise appears above the fold. What risk do they remove. What do they hide.
Join two communities where buyers hang out. Lurk for a week before posting. Selling on day one is how you earn mute buttons.
Pick one competitor to beat on a single axis for ninety days. Publicly measure yourself against that axis. Focus is a brand.
What good looks like
What good looks like: an enemy memo, a swipe file, and a wedge you can defend for ninety days. Confusion about competitors means you will copy them by accident.
Common failure mode: trying to beat everyone on every axis. Empires fall that way. Pick one fight.
Series bridge
Series bridge: this chapter sits between naming the offer and designing the flag. If you skipped here, go back one part and finish the checklist first. The playbook only compounds when each layer is real — research under offer, offer under site, site under product, product under distribution.
Keep a single Notion page titled Kingdom OS and paste the outcome of this part at the bottom before you leave. Date it. Future you will skim twenty dated notes faster than twenty open browser tabs. That page becomes the operating system the last chapter asks you to run daily.