Strategy & Planning

How to run competitive research as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Strategy & PlanningFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're a solo coach or two-person course team trying to figure out why last cohort's enrollment was 40% lower than the one before. You have a Kajabi analytics tab open, a Google Sheet with ad spend from your VA, a ConvertKit broadcast report in another tab, and zero idea which of your three Instagram reels actually drove signups. You spend two hours before a launch cobbling together a 'competitive landscape' that's really just you manually checking three competitors' sales pages and guessing at their pricing. You have no systematic way to track what's changing in your niche, who's launching what, and whether your positioning is drifting stale between cohorts.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A weekly digest that pulls your traffic, conversion, and referral data from PostHog and emails you the three things that changed since last week — no dashboard to remember to check

A browser-automated monitoring routine that checks competitor course pages, pricing, and launch activity on a schedule and logs what changed

A living competitive research doc in Notion that Starch keeps updated and searchable, so you're not rebuilding context from scratch before every cohort launch

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

Growth Analyst Knowledge Management X Mentions Tracker

Data sources & config

Growth Analyst connects to PostHog from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the weekly digest runs — and uses Gmail (Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule) to deliver the summary. Competitor page monitoring runs through Starch's browser automation — no API needed for Kajabi, Teachable, or any competitor's public sales page. X Mentions Tracker uses browser automation to pull mentions daily. All research findings write into Notion, which Starch syncs on a schedule so the Knowledge Management app can search across everything.

Prompts to copy

Connect my PostHog project and email me every Monday morning with: total new signups this week vs last week, top 3 referral sources driving trial starts, conversion rate from free lead magnet to paid enrollment, and one thing I should test or change based on what the data shows.

Every week, use browser automation to check the sales pages for [Competitor A], [Competitor B], and [Competitor C] — log any pricing changes, new bonuses, new testimonials, or new course tiers into a Notion database called 'Competitor Tracker'. Flag anything that changed since the last check.

Track daily X mentions of '[my course name]', '[competitor course name]', and '[niche keyword like 'cohort-based course']' — log them into my Notion competitive research database with the post text, author follower count, and engagement.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog and install the Growth Analyst starter app. The out-of-the-box weekly digest covers signup trends, top referrers, and conversion rate by channel — takes about five minutes to configure.

2 Tell the Growth Analyst what your funnel looks like: 'My conversion event is checkout_completed. My lead magnet opt-in event is leadmagnet_downloaded. My paid product is course_enrollment.' Starch maps these to your PostHog event schema.

3 Set the delivery cadence — most course founders choose Monday 7am so they have data before the week's marketing decisions. Connect your Gmail so the digest lands in your inbox, not a dashboard you'll forget.

4 Open a new automation in Starch and describe your competitor monitoring routine: name three to five competitor sales page URLs and tell Starch what to look for — pricing tables, bonus stacks, enrollment open/closed status, and testimonial counts.

5 Starch builds a browser automation that visits each URL on your schedule (weekly before a launch, monthly otherwise), extracts the relevant content, and logs a structured entry — date checked, what changed, screenshot link — into a Notion database you name 'Competitor Tracker'.

6 Install the X Mentions Tracker app and configure it with your course name, your handle, two or three competitor handles, and one or two niche keywords. It runs daily via browser automation and appends results to the same Notion database.

7 Connect Notion to Starch's scheduled sync so the Knowledge Management app can index everything: your competitor tracker entries, your past launch debrief docs, your curriculum outlines, your student FAQ answers.

8 Ask Starch to build a competitive research summary app: 'Every Friday, read my Competitor Tracker Notion database, my X mentions from this week, and my Growth Analyst digest, then write a 300-word competitive brief I can read in five minutes before I plan next week's content.' Starch assembles this as a scheduled automation that emails you the brief.

9 Before your next cohort launch, prompt: 'Look at my Competitor Tracker entries from the last 60 days. Summarize what competitors have changed in pricing or positioning, and flag anything I should address in my own sales page or launch emails.' Starch reads your Notion data and gives you a concrete answer.

10 Use the Knowledge Management app to build a searchable 'launch intelligence' doc — paste in past launch debrief notes, competitor research outputs, and Growth Analyst digests. Next time a team member or contractor needs context, they search instead of asking you.

11 Set a 'pre-launch competitive check' automation that fires automatically 10 days before any launch date you add to Google Calendar — Starch syncs your calendar on a schedule — triggering a fresh competitor scrape and emailing you the diff from last time.

12 Review the first three weekly digests and refine: if a competitor changed their price and you didn't catch it in time last cycle, add their pricing page URL to the browser automation. The system gets sharper each cohort.

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

Spring 2026 Cohort Launch Prep — April 7

Sample numbers from a real run

PostHog: new signups this week	47
PostHog: lead magnet → enrollment conversion rate	6
Top referral source (Instagram bio link)	31
Competitor A: price increase detected ($997 → $1,297)	1,297
X mentions of 'cohort course design' this week	23
Days until launch	10

On Monday April 7, the Growth Analyst digest landed at 7am: 47 new signups that week, up from 29 the week before. Instagram bio link drove 31 of them — almost double any other channel. Conversion from lead magnet download to paid enrollment was sitting at 6%, which the digest flagged as below the 8–9% range from the two previous cohorts and suggested revisiting the follow-up email sequence. Separately, Friday's automated competitive brief surfaced something important: Competitor A had quietly raised their flagship course from $997 to $1,297 sometime in the past week. The browser automation caught it because it checks their pricing table every Monday — without it, you'd have found out when a student mentioned it in a DM three days into your launch. You updated your own sales page to reframe your $897 price point against theirs. The X mentions tracker logged 23 posts about 'cohort course design' that week — two of them were threads with 400+ likes complaining that live cohorts are too time-intensive. You added one FAQ answer to your sales page addressing async options. Total prep time for a competitive brief that used to take two hours: about fifteen minutes of reading.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Lead magnet opt-in → paid enrollment conversion rate (by cohort)

Top 3 referral sources driving actual signups (not just traffic)

Number of competitor pricing or positioning changes detected per quarter

Weeks between a competitor change happening and you knowing about it

Cost per enrolled student by acquisition channel

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Manual Google Sheets + browser tabs

Free but takes two hours before every launch, relies on you remembering to check, and produces no historical log of what changed when.

Similarweb or SpyFu

Good for traffic estimation on large competitors but won't catch pricing page changes, bonus stack updates, or enrollment open/closed status on a Kajabi or Teachable page.

Brand24 or Mention.com

Solid for social listening but adds another paid SaaS subscription and still requires you to manually connect insights to your own conversion data and pre-launch planning.

Hiring a VA for weekly research

Works if you have the budget and a reliable person, but you're still building the brief yourself mentally — and every handoff cycle adds latency before a launch.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — growth analyst, knowledge management, x mentions tracker 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

My course is on Kajabi — can Starch pull my enrollment and revenue data directly from there?

Kajabi doesn't appear as a scheduled-sync provider in Starch today. For enrollment and revenue numbers, the cleanest path is connecting Stripe (Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule) since Kajabi processes payments through Stripe. For traffic and funnel data, PostHog is what the Growth Analyst is built on. If you need to pull data from Kajabi's own dashboard, Starch can automate that through your browser — no Kajabi API needed.

Will the competitor monitoring work if a competitor's sales page requires a login or is hidden behind a waitlist?

If the page is public-facing, yes — browser automation handles it. If it requires a logged-in account you own (like you're a paying student on a competitor's platform), Starch can automate that session using your credentials. If it's truly hidden, there's nothing to scrape — but that's true of any tool.

I use ConvertKit for email, not Gmail. Can the weekly digest still land in my inbox?

Yes. The Growth Analyst digest delivers via Gmail (Starch syncs Gmail on a schedule). If your primary inbox is Gmail, it works out of the box. If you use a different email client, you can connect it — Outlook is also a scheduled-sync provider. ConvertKit itself is reachable from Starch's integration catalog for building automations against your subscriber and broadcast data.

Does Starch store my competitor research history, or does it re-scrape from scratch every time?

Starch writes findings into Notion on each run and syncs Notion on a schedule. That gives you a running log of every check — date, what was found, what changed. The Knowledge Management app indexes it so you can search across all past entries. Starch is not a long-horizon data warehouse, so for deep archival analytics over years of data you'd want an external store, but for 12–18 months of launch research history, Notion as the record and Starch as the query layer works well.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm sharing PostHog data and some student data in automations.

Not yet. Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your course business has contractual obligations requiring SOC 2 vendors — for example if you serve enterprise clients or process sensitive health coaching data — that's worth knowing upfront. For most solo coaches and small cohort programs without those contractual requirements, it's not a blocker, but it's an honest limit.

How much setup does this actually take if I've never used Starch before?

The Growth Analyst starter app is the fastest entry point — connect PostHog, configure your key events, set a delivery day, and you're running in under 30 minutes. The competitor monitoring automation takes longer because you're describing the specific pages and data points you want tracked, but for three competitors with clear pricing tables, plan for 45–60 minutes to describe it, review what Starch built, and test the first run. The X Mentions Tracker is pre-built — add your keywords and it runs.