Guide

How to do competitive analysis on Reddit

Forget G2 review-mining. The fastest way to learn where your competitors leak users is to read what their customers complain about on Reddit — unprompted, unfiltered, and dated. Here's the workflow founders use to turn that chatter into ranked pivots.

1. Build a competitor watch-list

List your 3–5 closest competitors plus the category leader. For each, write down the brand name, common nicknames, and any sub-products (e.g. Notion AI, Notion Calendar). Reddit users misspell and abbreviate — capture every variant.

2. Find the rooms where they're discussed

Search each name across both general subreddits (r/SaaS, r/Entrepreneur, r/productivity) and domain-specific ones (r/sysadmin, r/marketing, r/personalfinance). Sort by Top → Year for recurring pain, then by New for fresh churn signals.

3. Capture the smoking-gun threads

You're looking for four patterns: "switched from X to Y because…", "X is great but I wish it…", "how do you work around X's…", and "is there an alternative to X for…". Each of those URLs goes straight into your vault — don't try to remember the gist.

4. Distill instead of re-reading

Lurkr turns each thread into a strategic summary, key insights, themes, and an ROI × effort score in a single pass. After 20–30 captured threads, the opportunity engine ranks the recurring competitor weaknesses by addressable pain × build effort — the leaderboard you'd never assemble by hand.

5. Cluster the themes

Theme extraction surfaces the patterns: "billing surprises", "slow support", "missing API", "mobile parity". Each theme is a candidate wedge — a place where a focused competitor (you) can outflank a broader one.

6. Turn pain into a pivot brief

Chat with your vault when it's time to write the brief: "What do users hate most about Competitor X's onboarding?" RAG conversations grounded in your own saved intelligence beat opening 40 tabs and trying to hold it in your head.

7. Ship the experiment, not the deck

Every distilled post produces a concrete checklist — landing-page tests, interview scripts, MVP cuts. Pick the highest-ROI theme, work the checklist, and let next week's saved threads tell you whether you got warmer or colder.