You found out a competitor shipped the exact feature you'd been planning for two quarters — and you found out from a customer, not from your own research. That sting is familiar to most founders. CB Insights' analysis of startup post-mortems puts "got outcompeted" among the top reasons companies fail, yet most teams track rivals through a graveyard of browser tabs, a Slack channel nobody reads, and a spreadsheet that went stale three months ago.
The reason isn't laziness. It's that real competitive intelligence is a chore: find the competitors, open every pricing page, copy the changes, tag them, decide what matters, repeat next week. Do that for five competitors and it's tedious. Do it for fifty and it's a part-time job you'll quietly abandon by week three.
You don't build the tracker. You describe it.
Here's the shift. The old way of doing this in any tool — including the old Dotallio — was to build a board by hand: create columns, name them, pick types, set up views, then start filling rows. That setup tax is exactly where most competitive-tracking projects die.
The new Dotallio is chat-first. You describe the outcome you want in plain language, and Dotallio assembles the whole thing for you — the board, the columns, the right column types, sample rows, and the views. Then it keeps that thing alive with web research and AI. You're not maintaining a spreadsheet anymore. You're directing an analyst.
And everything it produces is a versionable, editable artifact: the competitor board, the briefs, the charts, the summary docs. Roll any of them back, refine them, share them with a public link or keep them workspace-private.
A real session: from zero to a 50-competitor radar
Let's walk through what you'd actually type. The fastest start is the Competitive Intelligence Hub app template — a prebuilt app you install and then shape by chatting. Or you can start from a sentence:
Create a competitive intelligence hub for my project-management SaaS. Columns for competitor name, website, category (direct / indirect / emerging), pricing model, target customer, key differentiator, last funding round, and a threat-level rating. Add a few example rows so I can see the shape.
Dotallio creates the board with the right column types — a URL field for the website, a single-select for category, a rating column for threat level — plus a handful of realistic sample rows so you're not staring at an empty grid. That board is your radar.
Now you fill it. You don't paste fifty rows by hand:
Research the top 50 competitors to a SaaS project-management tool. Add each one as a row with their website, category, pricing model, and one-line differentiator. Use live web search.
This is where Smart Workflows earn their keep. At the higher "smart" levels, Dotallio plans the work — research, then generate, then write the rows — runs live web research, and fills the board in bulk. You get fifty rows with sourced details instead of an afternoon of copy-paste.
Already have a list? Drop it in. Paste messy notes, a CSV from your last analysis, or even a screenshot of a market-map slide:
Here's a screenshot of a competitor landscape slide. Pull out every company in it and add them to my competitive intelligence board, matched to the right category.
Dotallio's vision OCR reads the image, extracts the company names, and structures them straight into your rows — no retyping.
Want the strategic picture, not just the list?
From this board, make a pie chart of competitors by pricing model, and write a one-page brief on where the biggest positioning gaps are.
You get a chart (Mermaid-rendered) and a doc — both editable artifacts. Edit the brief's wording, regenerate the chart when the data changes, and the versions are all there if you need to walk back a change.
Keeping it alive: the 10-minutes-a-week part
A one-time research dump is useful for a day. The reason this becomes a 10-minutes-a-week habit is that the board keeps working between your check-ins — on your terms.
AI-filled columns. Add a column and describe what it should contain, and Dotallio fills it across every row. "Add a column summarizing each competitor's latest pricing page changes." "Add a column rating how directly each one competes with us, 1–5." The column type is inferred; the values are written for you.
Row enrichment on demand. New competitor lands on your radar with just a name and URL? Run enrichment and Dotallio researches the blanks — funding, positioning, target customer — and backfills the row.
Triggered, not unattended. You stay in control of when research runs. Kick off a refresh on demand, wire it to a button on the board, fire it on a board event (a new row added), or hit it from an incoming webhook when another system flags a change. Dotallio doesn't silently run while you sleep — it runs when you or your tools ask it to, which is exactly what you want for research you'll act on.
@-mention for context. Writing a positioning doc? @-mention your competitive board in the chat to pull its data into the draft, so your strategy memo cites the same facts your radar holds.
Versioned artifacts. Every brief, chart, and summary is a deliverable you can revisit. Last month's competitive snapshot is still there to compare against this month's. Set visibility to share the public-facing version with your team or board without exposing the working notes.
What 10 minutes actually looks like
It's Monday morning. You open your competitive hub.
You added two new entrants you heard about over the weekend — just names and URLs. You run enrichment; Dotallio fills in their pricing, positioning, and target customer from live web research while you get coffee.
You type:
Refresh the "recent changes" column for all direct competitors, and flag any that changed pricing or launched something in the last two weeks.
Three rows light up. One competitor moved to usage-based pricing. You @-mention the board in a quick chat:
Draft a two-paragraph note for my team on the usage-based pricing shift at [competitor] and what it means for our positioning.
You get a clean doc, tweak one sentence, and share it to the workspace. Total time: under ten minutes. You caught a pricing shift the same week it happened instead of three months later from a churned customer.
That's the difference between competitive intelligence as a dreaded chore and competitive intelligence as a standing system that mostly runs itself.
Why this beats the old way
- No setup tax. You describe the radar in one sentence; Dotallio builds the board, columns, and views.
- Live web research built in. Smart Workflows populate and enrich rows from the actual web, not your memory.
- Photos and messy notes welcome. Vision OCR turns a market-map screenshot or a pasted list into structured rows.
- Everything's an editable artifact. Boards, briefs, and charts are versioned — edit, roll back, and control visibility.
- You stay in control of timing. Research runs on demand, on a button, on a board event, or via webhook — never silently.
- One workspace. The board, the chart, the brief, and the team note all live together and reference the same facts.
Stop finding out from your customers
The founders who win on competitive intelligence aren't the ones with the biggest research team. They're the ones who turned tracking from a weekly slog into a system that updates itself when they ask. Describe your radar, drop in your competitors, and let Smart Workflows do the legwork — then spend your ten minutes on the part only you can do: deciding what to do about it.
Try Dotallio Free and put your competitive intelligence on autopilot.
