The Fifty
Fifty questions. Six competitors. Every cell sourced.
A structured competitive grid across market, product, positioning, marketing, sales and company. Every cell carries a URL and a date, or is explicitly marked unknown. No silent blanks.
What most competitive analysis gets wrong.
Blank cells.
A blank is indistinguishable from a question nobody asked. Every cell here gets an answer or an explicit status: not public, not found, needs internal data.
Unsourced claims.
Pricing, customer counts and headcounts are the three most-repeated and least-checked numbers in any deck. Each one here is quoted verbatim with the date it was captured.
The competitor nobody researches.
Doing nothing. The spreadsheet. The internal build. In most categories the honest answer to "what did they consider" is "you and inertia", and a grid built only from named vendors has nothing to say about the majority of lost deals.
The two rows that pay for the rest.
Row 12 · Perceived strengths
Row 13 · Perceived weaknesses
Synthesised from public review corpora with the pattern and its frequency, not one cherry-picked quote. These are the rows that feed the battlecard.
It re-runs itself.
Full refresh quarterly. Weekly monitor on the volatile rows only: pricing, messaging, tagline, press, acquisitions, hiring. The weekly run reports only what changed and why it matters. This is one of the four stages that keeps running after the engagement ends.
Where it comes from.
This isn't a template. It's the framework I ran at a maritime data company against six competitors every quarter, rebuilt so it re-sources itself. A human-built version of the same grid filled about 28% of cells and left the rest blank with no sources.
THE FIFTY RUNS ON THREE COMPETITORS INSIDE THE GTM AUDIT