Strategy & Planning

How to run competitive research as Solo Media and Creator Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor Solo Media and Creator Founders3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're a solo or two-person media business, and competitive research means opening 15 browser tabs every few weeks when you finally panic about a rival newsletter eating your niche. You manually subscribe to competitors on Beehiiv or Substack, screenshot their sponsor placements, and paste notes into a Notion doc you rarely revisit. You track mentions of your own show on X by ego-searching every few days. You have no idea whether a competitor launched a paid tier, changed their posting cadence, or picked up a sponsor you've been pitching for months — until someone DMs you about it. This takes two to three hours when you do it, and you do it maybe once a quarter. It should happen weekly and cost you nothing.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Solo Media and Creator Founders3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A weekly competitive intelligence digest that tracks what rival newsletters, podcasts, and creators in your niche are doing — new sponsors, format changes, audience growth signals — pulled together automatically so you see it Monday morning instead of never.

A daily X mentions tracker that logs every time your brand, show name, or key topics get mentioned, so you catch brand deals competitors are landing, audience conversations worth joining, and coverage you'd otherwise miss.

A living research doc in Notion that accumulates competitive observations over time, tagged and searchable, so your quarterly strategy calls have actual data behind them instead of gut feel.

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

X Mentions Tracker uses browser automation — no X API needed — to run daily searches and log results. Starch syncs your Notion workspace on a schedule, so the competitive intel database accumulates over time and the Growth Analyst can read it. Gmail is connected as a scheduled-sync provider to receive and send the weekly digest. PostHog is connected from Starch's integration catalog for your own audience growth context alongside the competitive picture.

Prompts to copy

Track daily mentions of '[your show name]', '[competitor newsletter name]', '[your niche keyword, e.g. indie SaaS]', and '[your top sponsor category, e.g. B2B software]' on X. Log each mention with the author handle, follower count, full text, and a one-sentence summary of sentiment. Save results to a Notion database called Competitive Intel.

Every Monday, pull last week's X mentions data from Notion and email me a digest. Include: which competitors got mentioned most, what sponsors appeared in their content or ads this week, any new creator partnerships or brand deals I should know about, and three things worth acting on before next week.

Build me a competitive research tracker in Notion. Each entry should have: competitor name, platform (newsletter/podcast/YouTube), last observed sponsor, estimated posting cadence, paid tier yes/no, notes, and date last updated. Auto-categorize entries by niche and flag any competitor I haven't reviewed in 30 days.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open the X Mentions Tracker in the Starch App Store and install it. This is a live pre-built app — no setup beyond telling it which handles and keywords to watch.

2 Tell Starch which terms to monitor: your show name, your top two or three competitor handles or newsletter names, and one or two sponsor-category keywords (e.g. 'AI tools newsletter' or 'indie hacker podcast'). Starch automates X through your browser — no X API or developer account required.

3 Connect your Notion workspace. Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule, so the mentions log becomes a database that grows every day without you touching it.

4 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch can send you the weekly digest directly to your inbox — the one you actually check.

5 Describe the competitive intel Notion database you want: 'Build me a tracker with columns for competitor name, platform, last observed sponsor, posting cadence, paid tier status, and a notes field. Flag anyone I haven't reviewed in 30 days.' Starch builds the schema and wires it to the mentions feed.

6 Describe the weekly digest automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, read last week's X mentions from my Notion database, summarize which competitors are getting traction, which sponsors are showing up in their content, and tell me three things I should act on this week. Email it to me.' Starch builds and schedules this automation.

7 Install the Growth Analyst app and connect PostHog so your own traffic and subscriber growth data sits next to the competitive picture. Now your Monday digest tells you both what competitors are doing and whether your own numbers moved.

8 Install Knowledge Management and point it at your Notion competitive intel database. Now you can ask 'which sponsors has [competitor] run in the last 90 days?' and get an answer from your own accumulated research instead of opening tabs.

9 Run the tracker for two weeks to build a baseline. After that, your Monday digest has week-over-week comparison — you'll start to see patterns in competitor posting cadence and sponsor rotation that weren't visible before.

10 When you're pitching a sponsor, ask Starch: 'Search my competitive intel Notion database for any mentions of [sponsor name] and tell me which creators in my niche have already worked with them.' You now walk into that pitch knowing the competitive context.

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

Week of March 9, 2026 — Competitive Intel Digest for a B2B SaaS Newsletter

Sample numbers from a real run

X mentions of '[Competitor Newsletter A]' this week	47
X mentions of your show this week	12
Sponsor appearances logged for Competitor A (3 distinct brands)	3
New paid tier announcement detected (Competitor B)	1
Competitor Notion entries flagged as not reviewed in 30+ days	2

You open your inbox Monday at 8am. Starch's digest tells you that The Operator Brief — a direct competitor in the B2B SaaS newsletter space — got 47 X mentions this week versus your 12, mostly because they published a breakdown of a public acquisition. More important: their sponsor slot this week was Loom, which you've been pitching for six weeks with no response. Starch flagged this because 'Loom' appeared in three separate X posts quoting their issue. You now know Loom is actively buying newsletter placements in your category and your pitch timing is right — they just went with someone else first. The digest also caught that Bootstrapped Founder launched a paid tier at $15/month, something you'd been debating. Two of your competitor Notion entries hadn't been updated in 35 days; Starch flagged them. The whole review took four minutes, not two hours.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Sponsor bleed rate — how many sponsors you pitched this quarter ended up running with a competitor first

Share of X conversation — your brand mentions as a percentage of total mentions across your tracked keywords week over week

Competitor posting cadence changes — whether rivals are publishing more or less frequently than your baseline

Time-to-awareness for competitor moves — how quickly you learn about a competitor's new paid tier, format change, or sponsor deal after it happens

Competitive intel database freshness — percentage of tracked competitors reviewed in the last 30 days

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Manual Notion doc + ego-searching X

Free but requires discipline you don't have — in practice it happens quarterly at best and produces unstructured notes that never get reviewed.

Sparktoro

Good for audience research and where a competitor's audience hangs out, but doesn't track ongoing sponsor activity or give you a weekly recurring digest tied to your own data.

Feedly or similar RSS aggregators

Tracks competitor content publishing well but misses sponsor placements, X conversation, and won't pull your own growth data alongside the competitive picture.

Brand24 or Mention.com

Solid dedicated mention-tracking tools with more historical data, but they're another dashboard to check rather than a digest delivered to you, and they don't connect to your Notion, Gmail, or subscriber analytics.

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

Does this require an X developer account or API access?

No. The X Mentions Tracker runs through browser automation — Starch navigates X the same way you would, without needing API credentials or a developer account. This matters because X's API tiers have gotten expensive and restrictive for small operators.

Can Starch track competitor newsletters on Beehiiv or Substack directly?

Not via a direct Beehiiv or Substack integration today. The practical workaround: Starch can automate your browser to visit a competitor's public archive page and log new posts, or you can track indirect signals — X mentions, sponsor appearances in posts, audience discussion — which often tells you more than the raw publish feed anyway.

Will this actually run without me touching it, or will it break after a week?

The scheduled automation runs on the cadence you set and emails you if something fails. Browser automation can occasionally hit a hiccup if X changes its layout, but Starch's CUA worker runs independent sessions and a single failure doesn't block the rest of the run. If a week's digest is incomplete, you'll know.

I'm not technical. Can I actually set this up myself?

Yes — you describe what you want in plain English and Starch builds it. The X Mentions Tracker is a pre-built app you install from the App Store. The Notion database schema, the weekly digest automation, and the Knowledge Management search layer are all described in natural language prompts. There's no drag-and-drop workflow builder and no code.

Is my competitive research data stored somewhere I can actually query later?

Yes — because Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule, your competitive intel database accumulates over time and is searchable through Knowledge Management. One honest limit: Starch is designed for live data surfaces, not long-horizon data warehousing. If you need five years of archived mentions with statistical analysis, a dedicated data warehouse is the right tool. For a creator business tracking a few dozen competitors week to week, the Notion-backed approach covers it.

Can I track competitor YouTube or podcast metrics too?

YouTube Studio and podcast analytics platforms (Spotify for Podcasters, Apple Podcasts Connect) are web-based, so Starch can automate your browser to pull publicly visible data — subscriber counts, video view counts on public channels, episode rankings. For your own show's data, connect Google Analytics 4 from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when your growth dashboard needs it.