What should I actually track about a competitor?

What their customers say, more than what their marketing says. Pricing changes, outages, support failures, feature complaints, and people asking in public for an alternative. Their site tells you what they want you to see; their users tell you where the gap is. Eko watches both and separates the merely interesting from the two or three things worth acting on this week.

Is competitor monitoring legal?

Monitoring public conversations is legal and ordinary business practice. What is not acceptable is joining private spaces under a false identity, scraping behind logins, or contacting someone in a way that misrepresents who you are. Eko reads public posts and the servers you invite her into, and she never posts on her own. She drafts, a human decides.

How do I catch customers who want to switch?

Watch for the sentence, not the brand name. People announce a switch before they make one: anyone moved off this recently, they just raised our price again, looking for something similar but cheaper. Those are buying questions wearing a complaint. Eko flags them as switch intent and hands them to Buska for scoring and outreach instead of leaving them in the thread.

How often should a small team review competitors?

Weekly for the picture, immediately for the exception. A weekly memo is enough to notice a pattern: three complaints about the same bug, a pricing page change, a churn thread gaining replies. But a competitor outage or a public switching question is worth an interruption, because that window is hours, not days.

Use case · Competitor monitoring in Slack and DiscordTheir unhappy customers are your warmest pipeline.

Competitor intelligence usually means a Slack channel of screenshots someone remembered to paste. Eko makes it systematic: she follows your competitors' public conversations, spots pricing backlash and churn signals, and separates 'good to know' from 'act this week'.

What is competitor monitoring?

Competitor monitoring is the practice of systematically tracking what customers say about your competitors in public (complaints, pricing changes, outages, switching intent) to sharpen your positioning and catch warm pipeline the moment it appears.

Complaints, categorized

Pricing anger, support failures, missing features: each competitor complaint is classified and trended, so you know which weakness is structural and which was one bad week.

The weekly memo your exec team reads

Every Friday: what each competitor shipped, what their customers said, and where the narrative is moving. Built from over a thousand conversations, readable in three minutes.

Switch-intent goes to Buska

When someone posts 'our bill tripled, looking at alternatives', that's not intelligence, that's pipeline. One button hands it to Buska, scored and enriched, while Eko keeps tracking the thread.

Where Buska takes over

Eko never trash-talks competitors and never DMs their users. Commercial follow-up is Buska's job, done from your account, by your team, with full context attached.

A real card from this playbook

Search Waypoint

# market-listening

Eko's desk · signals, briefs & market memos · Social intelligence by Buska

Eko is listening

EkoApp9:47 AM

Competitor complainthighnegativeBuska intent 82/100

Reddit · r/SaaS · 38 upvotes · u/growthledger (Posts weekly in r/SaaS) · 1 h ago · View original

“Onbordly just moved checklists and progress emails to their 'Scale' plan. Our bill went from $89 to $340 overnight. Looking at alternatives. What are people using for customer onboarding?”

Why it matters: Churned competitor users with an active thread are the cheapest pipeline you'll get this quarter. Two commenters already fit your ICP.

Recommended: This is commercial: send it to Buska for scoring and outreach. If you also want to join the thread, I've drafted a helpful, non-salesy reply.

Rule applied · Commercial intent goes to Buska: If a signal looks like a buying opportunity, Eko surfaces a 'Send to Buska' action instead of engaging. Lead gen is Buska's job.

Message #market-listening

competitor complaints tracked in the demo week, 4x spike caught

Friday

market memo covering every competitor, automatically

82/100

Buska intent score on the switch-intent thread Eko handed off

Frequently asked questions

What should I actually track about a competitor?: What their customers say, more than what their marketing says. Pricing changes, outages, support failures, feature complaints, and people asking in public for an alternative. Their site tells you what they want you to see; their users tell you where the gap is. Eko watches both and separates the merely interesting from the two or three things worth acting on this week.
Is competitor monitoring legal?: Monitoring public conversations is legal and ordinary business practice. What is not acceptable is joining private spaces under a false identity, scraping behind logins, or contacting someone in a way that misrepresents who you are. Eko reads public posts and the servers you invite her into, and she never posts on her own. She drafts, a human decides.
How do I catch customers who want to switch?: Watch for the sentence, not the brand name. People announce a switch before they make one: anyone moved off this recently, they just raised our price again, looking for something similar but cheaper. Those are buying questions wearing a complaint. Eko flags them as switch intent and hands them to Buska for scoring and outreach instead of leaving them in the thread.
How often should a small team review competitors?: Weekly for the picture, immediately for the exception. A weekly memo is enough to notice a pattern: three complaints about the same bug, a pricing page change, a churn thread gaining replies. But a competitor outage or a public switching question is worth an interruption, because that window is hours, not days.

Playbook last reviewed 2026-09-21

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