Ask HN: What tools do you use to discover competitors?
4 flippyhead 8 5/30/2025, 2:21:12 PM
Yeah yeah I know, don't be too obsessed with competition but also, when I have some new dumb idea I first buy the domain and then... I always want to get a sense of the competative landscape and market.
What tools do you use to quickly find most competitors to a given idea?
Years ago, before BERT and all that, I worked on a search engine for patents where you could give it a paragraph describing an invention and it would use a combination of document embeddings and probability-based full text search to find matching patent and non-patent literature.
Today's embeddings (see SBERT) are much better than what we had back then and I bet if you had a database of company descriptions, maybe articles about them, you could write a paragraph about your business and find competitors.
- ChatGPT and Perplexity DeepResearch.
There are no competitors for ideas.
Only for execution.
Good luck.