Strategy & Planning

How to run competitive research as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Strategy & PlanningFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Competitive research lands on your plate like this: the CEO forwards a thread at 9pm asking 'what are [Competitor X] and [Competitor Y] actually doing on pricing now?' and wants a briefing by the Thursday exec meeting. You open six tabs, spend two hours reading G2 reviews, scraping pricing pages, skimming LinkedIn job postings to infer what they're building, and pasting notes into a Notion doc that nobody will find in three weeks. There's no repeatable system — just you burning time that should go toward OKR tracking or board prep. The research is stale the moment you finish it, and you're doing the whole thing manually every single time.

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Strategy & PlanningFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A recurring competitive intelligence tracker that automatically pulls competitor pricing pages, job boards, and public announcements through browser automation — no API needed for any of them.

A structured Notion database that captures each competitor's positioning, pricing tier changes, and recent product moves, updated on a schedule so it's never a one-off document.

A weekly digest delivered to you (or the CEO's inbox) that summarizes what changed, what's new, and where the gaps are — so the next time someone asks, the briefing is already half-written.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

X Mentions Tracker Growth Analyst Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Notion database on a schedule to store competitive snapshots over time. Starch syncs Gmail so the weekly digest lands in the right inbox. Starch automates competitor pricing pages, LinkedIn job boards, G2 review pages, and any other web properties through your browser — no API needed for any of them. X Mentions Tracker uses browser automation to pull public mention data daily. The Growth Analyst connects to PostHog from Starch's integration catalog, queried live, to add your own product's traffic and conversion context alongside competitor data.

Prompts to copy

Every Monday morning, visit the public pricing pages for [Competitor A], [Competitor B], and [Competitor C], extract their current plan names, prices, and feature lists, and save the results to my Competitive Intel database in Notion.

Check the LinkedIn job postings for [Competitor A] and [Competitor B] through the browser, pull any new engineering, product, or sales roles posted in the last 7 days, and append them to a 'Hiring Signals' table so I can infer where they're investing.

Pull all X mentions of @[CompetitorHandle] from this week's X Mentions Tracker, filter for posts with more than 50 likes or replies, and summarize the top themes — complaints, praise, and feature requests — into a short brief.

Combine the pricing snapshot, hiring signals, and X sentiment from this week into a 300-word competitive summary and email it to me and the CEO every Thursday at 8am.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 List the five competitors you actually care about — not an exhaustive market map, just the five names that come up in sales calls and board conversations.

2 Identify the three signals that matter most for each: typically public pricing, recent job postings (as a proxy for product roadmap), and brand sentiment on X or review sites like G2.

3 Connect Notion so Starch can write structured competitive snapshots to a database on a schedule. Tell Starch: 'Create a Notion database called Competitive Intel with fields for competitor name, date captured, pricing tiers, notable product changes, and hiring signal tags.'

4 Set up a browser automation for each competitor's pricing page. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday, visit [URL], extract the plan names, prices, and three headline features for each tier, and add a new row to my Competitive Intel Notion database.'

5 Set up a LinkedIn job-posting scrape. Tell Starch: 'Check the LinkedIn Jobs page for [Competitor A] weekly, pull any new roles in engineering or product, and flag them in a Hiring Signals column in Notion.' Starch automates this through your browser — no LinkedIn API required.

6 Install the X Mentions Tracker app to monitor competitor handles and brand keywords daily. Use it to surface spikes in negative sentiment or sudden engagement that might signal a product launch or pricing change.

7 Connect Gmail so Starch can send the digest. Tell Starch: 'Every Thursday at 8am, compile this week's Competitive Intel Notion entries and X mention summary into a 300-word briefing and send it to [your email] and [CEO email].'

8 Add G2 or Capterra scraping for review velocity — useful before board meetings. Tell Starch: 'Once a month, visit the G2 page for [Competitor A], count the number of new reviews in the last 30 days, note the current average rating, and pull the three most recent reviews into a summary.'

9 Use the Knowledge Management app to make all competitive intel findable. Tell Starch: 'Index the Competitive Intel Notion database so that when anyone on the exec team asks a question about competitor pricing, the AI surfaces the most recent snapshot.'

10 Before a board meeting or pricing review, prompt Starch to synthesize: 'Pull every competitive snapshot from the last 90 days, compare pricing changes, summarize the three biggest moves any competitor made, and draft a two-page briefing I can use in Thursday's exec meeting.'

11 Iterate the cadence. If the weekly digest is too noisy, change it to bi-weekly. If a competitor launches something big, you can manually trigger a one-off scrape rather than waiting for Monday's run.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q2 2026 Pricing Review Briefing — April prep

Sample numbers from a real run

Competitor A — pricing page scrape	0
Competitor A — new engineering job postings (past 7 days)	4
Competitor B — plan price change detected (Pro tier: $79 → $99)	99
Competitor C — G2 reviews in past 30 days	17
Competitor C — current G2 average rating	4
X mentions flagged (>50 engagements) across all three handles	23

It's the Tuesday before your April board meeting. The CEO asks for a competitive slide by Thursday. Instead of starting from scratch, you open the Competitive Intel Notion database Starch has been writing to every Monday. Competitor B quietly moved their Pro tier from $79/month to $99/month two weeks ago — Starch caught it on the 7th, logged it, and included it in that week's Thursday digest, which you'd already skimmed. Competitor A posted four new senior ML engineering roles in the past week, suggesting they're accelerating a feature you've been watching. Competitor C's G2 review velocity jumped to 17 reviews in 30 days (up from 9 last month), and the X sentiment scrape flagged 23 high-engagement posts, mostly users praising a new onboarding flow. You prompt Starch: 'Summarize the last 90 days of Competitive Intel into a 5-bullet exec briefing focused on pricing, product signals, and brand momentum.' Three minutes later you have a first draft for the board slide. The CEO makes two edits. You're done by Wednesday afternoon.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time from competitive question asked to briefing delivered (target: same business day, not 2 days)

Freshness of competitive data — days since last pricing page snapshot per competitor

Number of competitive signals captured per week without manual research hours

Board and exec meetings where competitive context was available before the meeting (not assembled during it)

Hiring signal lag — days between competitor posting a role and your team being aware of it

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Notion + manual research

Notion is great for storing what you already know, but it doesn't go out and collect the data — you're still the one opening tabs, copying prices, and pasting notes.

Crayon or Klue

Purpose-built competitive intel platforms with strong coverage, but they're priced for dedicated product marketing teams and don't connect to your existing Notion, Gmail, and exec workflow the way Starch does.

ChatGPT or Claude with manual inputs

Good for synthesizing research you paste in, but there's no automation — you still gather the raw data yourself every time, and nothing persists between sessions.

Google Alerts

Free and low-effort to set up, but alerts are noisy, miss pricing changes (which aren't news items), and land in an inbox with no structure or synthesis.

Dedicated analyst hire

Gives you someone who owns the work, but you're 6-8 weeks from hiring, onboarding, and calibrating — and the output still depends on manual web research on their end.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — x mentions tracker, growth analyst, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Starch actually scrape competitor pricing pages without an API?

Yes. Starch automates any website through your browser — no API needed. If you can open the page in Chrome and read the price, Starch can do the same on a schedule and write the results to your Notion database. This includes login-gated pages if you give Starch credentials for a free trial account.

Will this work for competitors who don't publish pricing publicly?

For competitors with hidden pricing, Starch can still scrape job postings, G2 or Capterra profiles, and X activity. You can also set up a browser automation to check if a pricing page that previously showed prices now says 'Contact us' — that change itself is a signal worth logging.

Does Starch store competitive snapshots over time, or just show me the latest?

When you wire the Notion integration, Starch writes each weekly snapshot as a new row. You keep the full history — so before a board meeting you can ask Starch to compare this month's pricing data against three months ago, not just tell you what's true today.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? Some of this data touches sensitive competitive strategy.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your company requires SOC 2 certification for any tool that touches internal strategy documents, that's worth factoring in. Starch is honest about this limit.

How long does it take to set this up? I have a board meeting in five days.

The core setup — connecting Notion, configuring two or three pricing page automations, and setting up the Thursday digest — takes about an hour to describe and test. You can have the first manually triggered competitive snapshot within the same day. The scheduled weekly cadence kicks in from the following Monday.

Can the digest go to my CEO directly, or only to me?

The digest can go to any email address. Tell Starch who to include when you describe the automation. You can also set it up so the digest goes to a dedicated Slack channel that the CEO and relevant VPs already watch — Starch connects directly to Slack.