Strategy & Planning

How to run competitive research as DTC Brand Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You find out a competitor launched a new product line because someone mentions it in a Slack thread two weeks after the fact. Your 'competitive research' is a Google Doc nobody updates, a handful of browser tabs you forget to close, and whatever surfaces in your Meta ad library when you're procrastinating. You're watching your CAC climb and suspect a competitor's offer is undercutting you, but you can't confirm it because nobody on your three-person team has four hours to manually audit their site, their ads, their reviews, and their pricing. By the time you've assembled the picture, the window to react has closed.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A recurring competitive snapshot that scrapes competitor pricing pages, ad copy, and product launches through browser automation — no API needed, delivered to you on a schedule

A brand mentions tracker on X that logs every time your brand or a competitor's brand gets named, so you catch viral moments and negative sentiment before they compound

A Growth Analyst digest that ties what's happening in your market back to your own traffic and conversion data, so you know whether a competitor move is actually affecting you

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

Data sources & config

Starch automates competitor site scraping through your browser — no API needed — and writes results to an internal Starch table on a daily schedule. The X Mentions Tracker runs via browser automation to capture brand and competitor mentions. The Growth Analyst app connects directly to PostHog for traffic and conversion data and to Gmail to deliver your weekly digest. All three surfaces share the same competitive change log so your growth summary always has context.

Prompts to copy

Every weekday morning, visit [Competitor A]'s product pages and log any price changes, new SKUs, or out-of-stock flags into a Starch table. Do the same for [Competitor B] and [Competitor C]. If any change is detected, Slack me immediately.

Every Monday, pull my PostHog traffic and conversion data, cross-reference it with the competitive change log from the past week, and email me a summary of what shifted, which channels look affected, and what I should test next.

Track daily mentions of [my brand], [Competitor A], and [Competitor B] on X. Log them with sentiment, follower count of the poster, and a link. Flag anything with more than 50 likes.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 List the three to five competitors you actually care about — the ones whose ad creative you've copied screenshots of and whose pricing you've manually checked in the last 90 days. This is your competitive universe for now.

2 Install the X Mentions Tracker from the Starch App Store. Configure it with your brand handle, your top two competitor handles, and one or two category keywords (e.g., 'DTC supplements' or 'home workout equipment'). It runs daily via browser automation.

3 Tell Starch to build a browser automation that visits each competitor's product listing pages on a daily schedule, extracts current prices, identifies new or removed SKUs, and logs everything to a Starch table. You type: 'Every morning, go to these five URLs, pull the product name, price, and availability, and add a row to my Competitive Pricing table. Flag any row where the price changed from yesterday.'

4 Add a second browser automation to hit the Meta Ad Library for each competitor. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday, visit the Meta Ad Library, search for [Competitor A] ads, and log the top ten active ads — headline, creative description, and estimated run duration — into my Competitive Ads table.'

5 Install the Growth Analyst app and connect it to PostHog. This gives you a weekly email that surfaces your own traffic trends, top referrers, and conversion rate changes by channel — the demand-side signal you need to know whether a competitor move is actually hurting you.

6 Tell Starch to enrich your weekly Growth Analyst digest with the competitive log: 'When you generate my Monday growth summary, also pull the last seven days of rows from my Competitive Pricing table and my Competitive Ads table, and note any competitor changes that may explain shifts in my traffic or conversion rate.'

7 Wire a Slack alert for high-signal X mentions. Tell Starch: 'Any X mention with more than 100 likes that tags my brand or a competitor, Slack me in #brand-alerts immediately with the post text and a link.'

8 Set up a monthly competitive summary automation. Tell Starch: 'On the first of each month, summarize all competitor price changes, new SKUs, and ad copy shifts from the past 30 days. Format it as a one-page brief I can share with my team. Email it to me and save it to my Competitive Research Notion database.' Starch connects directly to Notion to file the brief automatically.

9 Review the first two weeks of data to calibrate signal-to-noise. Adjust your keyword list in the X Mentions Tracker and tighten the competitor URL list for the pricing scraper to drop pages that don't carry meaningful data.

10 Use the monthly brief as a standing agenda item in your quarterly board update. The data is already organized; you're not building a new doc from scratch each time.

See this running on Starch

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

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Worked example

Q1 2026 competitive sprint — DTC electrolyte brand

Sample numbers from a real run

Competitor A price drop detected (32oz SKU)	-3
Competitor B new 'Subscribe & Save' bundle launched	0
X mentions spike — competitor recall rumor	847
Your conversion rate, same week (PostHog)	4.2
Your conversion rate, prior week (PostHog)	3.1

On a Tuesday in February, the Starch pricing scraper flagged that Competitor A dropped the price on their 32oz SKU by $3 — from $34.99 to $31.99. The same morning, the X Mentions Tracker caught a spike of 847 posts mentioning Competitor B over a 48-hour window; Starch's Slack alert surfaced a rumor thread about a contamination issue in one of their batches. The Monday Growth Analyst digest that week showed your PostHog conversion rate jumped from 3.1% to 4.2% — the timing correlated with the competitor noise on X. Because all three signals landed in the same weekly summary with the same timestamp context, you could tell your board in March: 'We picked up roughly 1.1 points of conversion rate during a week of competitor turbulence, and we held pricing. Here's the data.' You didn't piece that together from three separate tools the night before the board call — Starch assembled it for you.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Competitor price delta week-over-week (by SKU)

Share of voice on X vs. top two competitors (mentions per week)

Your conversion rate change in weeks following a detected competitor move

Number of new competitor SKUs or bundle structures launched per quarter

Time from competitor event to internal awareness (target: same day, not two weeks later)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Manual Google Alerts + spreadsheet

Catches some PR coverage but misses pricing changes, ad copy shifts, and social spikes — and still requires a human to compile everything into a usable summary.

Crayon or Klue

Purpose-built competitive intelligence platforms with broader coverage, but priced for enterprise sales teams and not designed to connect your competitive data back to your own Shopify or ad performance in the same surface.

Brand24 or Mention

Good for social listening but limited to mentions — no pricing scraper, no ad library tracking, and no native connection to your growth or conversion data.

Hiring a junior analyst or VA

A person can handle nuance that automation misses, but a 10-hour-a-week contractor still needs tooling, a brief, and QA — and goes quiet on weekends when the interesting stuff often happens.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — x mentions tracker, growth analyst 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 websites if they don't have an API?

Yes. Starch automates your browser — the same way you'd manually click through a site — and extracts the data you specify. This works on any publicly accessible web page: product listing pages, pricing pages, the Meta Ad Library, Amazon listings. No API required. The one thing it can't do is access pages that are behind a login you don't have credentials for.

Will the competitor scraping break if they update their site layout?

It can. Browser automation is resilient to minor layout changes because Starch uses AI to interpret page content rather than brittle CSS selectors. But a significant site redesign may require you to update the automation. Starch will surface an error in those cases so you know to revisit it — it won't silently return empty data.

Does Starch store historical competitive data so I can see trends over time?

Yes — every row the scraper writes to a Starch table is timestamped and persisted, so you can query price history or mention volume over any date range. This is live data surfaces, not a long-horizon data warehouse, so if you need archived analytics going back years, that's worth knowing upfront. For most DTC founders tracking competitors week-to-week, the rolling history in Starch is more than enough.

Can I track competitors on platforms other than X?

Starch connects directly to LinkedIn through its integration, and can automate browser sessions on most social platforms, review sites like Trustpilot or G2, and Amazon product pages. If you want to track competitor reviews on a specific platform, describe what you want and Starch builds the automation — no API needed on the target site's end.

How is this different from just setting up a few Google Alerts?

Google Alerts catches news coverage and some blog mentions. It doesn't scrape pricing, doesn't monitor ad libraries, doesn't track social sentiment with volume data, and doesn't connect any of that back to your own conversion metrics. Starch's competitive research setup combines all of those signals and delivers them in a single weekly summary that already has your growth data for context — so you're not manually correlating three separate inboxes.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified?

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your company has a strict vendor security review process, that's worth flagging upfront. For most early-stage DTC brands, it's not a gating issue, but we'd rather you know than find out later.