Strategy & Planning

How to run competitive research as Restaurant and Hospitality Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You find out what your competitors are doing the same way everyone else does: you eat there, you scroll their Instagram, you hear from a server who worked there last month. When a new ramen spot opens two blocks away and starts running a happy hour special, you might not know for two weeks — after you've already seen the Tuesday cover count dip. You're not running a strategy team. You don't have time to set up Google Alerts, read through Yelp reviews for three competing properties, and cross-reference their OpenTable availability windows every week. So you skip it, run on instinct, and react six weeks late.

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Strategy & PlanningFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A weekly competitive digest that automatically surfaces new reviews, menu changes, pricing moves, and social activity from the restaurants and hotels you actually compete with — delivered before your first cover

An X Mentions Tracker that logs when your brand (or your competitors' brands) gets mentioned online, so you see sentiment shifts in real time instead of reading a one-star review three days after it went up

A running knowledge base that captures what you learn each week — competitor price points, promotion patterns, staffing signals — so your managers can reference it without asking you first

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 runs through browser automation — no X API needed. Yelp, Google Maps, TripAdvisor, competitor websites, and LinkedIn are all automated through your browser as well. Starch connects directly to Gmail (scheduled sync) to deliver weekly digests. The Knowledge Management app stores and organizes everything your research turns up so it's searchable by your team.

Prompts to copy

Every morning, go to Yelp, Google Maps, and TripAdvisor and pull the five most recent reviews for [Competitor A], [Competitor B], and [Competitor C]. Log the star rating, the date, and any mention of price, wait time, or specific dishes. Save the results in a table I can sort by competitor and date.

Track mentions of @MyRestaurant, @CompetitorA, and #[neighborhood]eats on X each day. Flag any post with more than 50 likes or that mentions pricing, service, or a new menu item. Send me a summary every morning at 7am.

Every Friday at noon, summarize what we learned about competitors this week: new menu items spotted, promotions running, review sentiment changes, and any staffing moves visible on LinkedIn. Format it as a one-page brief I can share with my floor manager.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 List the five to eight competitors you actually lose covers to — not the Michelin spot across town, but the Thursday-night spots your regulars mention when they don't book with you.

2 Connect Gmail through Starch's scheduled sync so weekly digests land in your inbox automatically and can also be logged to your knowledge base.

3 Install the X Mentions Tracker app from the App Store and configure it to monitor your handle, your top two or three competitors' handles, and two or three neighborhood hashtags relevant to your market.

4 Tell Starch to automate a daily browser sweep of Yelp, Google Maps, and TripAdvisor for each competitor — pulling star ratings, review counts, and text snippets that mention price, wait time, portions, or service quality. No API required for any of these sites.

5 Set up a second browser automation that checks each competitor's Instagram and website once a week for new menu items, prix fixe changes, or announced promotions.

6 Tell Starch to check LinkedIn weekly for job postings from your competitors — a flurry of line-cook listings signals a kitchen in chaos; a new GM hire signals a pivot. Starch automates this through your browser.

7 Install Knowledge Management and give Starch this prompt: 'Every Friday, take this week's competitor research and write a structured summary — competitor name, what changed, what it might mean for us — then save it to the knowledge base under Competitive Intel > [Month Year].'

8 Use Growth Analyst to connect your PostHog or web traffic data and flag weeks when your own site traffic or reservation-page visits drop, so you can correlate dips with competitor activity you captured that same week.

9 Set up a weekly brief automation: 'Every Sunday at 6pm, compile the week's competitor findings, our own cover count from [POS system] entered manually or via browser automation, and any X mentions flagged this week. Email me and my floor manager a two-page summary.'

10 After four weeks, ask Starch to analyze the knowledge base entries and identify patterns — which competitor runs promos on slow Tuesdays, which one spikes in review volume after events, which one's menu prices have crept up. Output a one-paragraph strategic note.

11 Share the competitive brief with your chef and front-of-house manager each week so menu and pricing decisions are grounded in what's actually happening in your neighborhood, not just instinct.

12 Revisit the competitor list quarterly — open new entrants, close any that shut down — and update the browser automation targets so your research stays current without you touching it.

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

Week of March 10, 2026 — competitive sweep for a 60-seat Italian trattoria in Chicago's West Loop

Sample numbers from a real run

Competitor A (new pasta spot, 3 blocks away) — Yelp review count change	47
Competitor B (wine bar) — new reviews mentioning 'prix fixe' this week	6
Competitor C (hotel restaurant) — X mentions flagged, 50+ likes	3
Your own X mentions this week	14
Competitor A job postings on LinkedIn (line cook, expo)	2

On Monday morning you open the Starch digest and see that Competitor A picked up 47 new Yelp reviews in seven days — unusually high. Six of them mention a $42 three-course prix fixe that launched last week. You didn't know about it. Competitor B's X mentions include three posts with 50+ likes complaining about a 45-minute wait on Saturday, which is useful: they're clearly slammed but undersupported. Competitor C posted a 'locals night' promotion that got 3 high-engagement mentions. Your own 14 X mentions are mostly positive post-dinner tags. The LinkedIn sweep shows Competitor A posted two kitchen jobs — line cook and expo — suggesting they're stretched thin despite the review surge. You take this to your chef on Tuesday: you're not running a prix fixe yet, but you now know the price point the neighborhood is responding to, and you know the competitor running it is understaffed. You decide to push your Friday tasting menu on Instagram this week and price it $4 below theirs. All of this took you zero hours of manual searching.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Competitor review velocity (new reviews per week per competitor, by platform)

Sentiment delta — percentage of competitor reviews mentioning price, wait, or service complaints vs. praise

Own brand mentions per week on X and Google, trended week-over-week

Time from competitor promotion launch to your awareness (target: under 48 hours)

Cover count correlation — weeks when competitor promo activity is high vs. your own walk-in volume

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Alerts + manual Yelp checking

Free but gives you keyword hits in your inbox with no structure, no competitor review tracking, and no synthesis — you still have to read everything and draw conclusions yourself.

Mention.com or Brand24

Good for social listening on your own brand, but won't pull Yelp review text, competitor menu changes, or LinkedIn job postings, and costs $50–200/month for a separate tool that still doesn't connect to your POS or calendar.

Hiring a marketing coordinator part-time

A person can add judgment you can't automate, but at $18–25/hour and 5–10 hours/week of research, you're spending $400–1,000/month for a report that still arrives on someone else's schedule.

Toast or Square analytics

Shows your own numbers clearly but has no visibility into what competitors are doing — it's a mirror, not a window.

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 pull reviews from Yelp and Google without an API?

Yes. Starch automates your browser to navigate to those pages the same way you would — logging reviews, ratings, and text. No formal API connection is needed for Yelp, Google Maps, or TripAdvisor. This is a first-class Starch pattern, not a workaround.

What if a competitor's website is minimal — just a PDF menu and a phone number?

Starch can still automate a browser visit to check for page changes week over week. If the PDF changes, it notices. If a new page goes up, it notices. It won't extract meaning from an unchanged PDF automatically, but you can tell Starch to flag any page-content change and send it to you for a manual look.

Does Starch store all the competitor research somewhere my floor manager can access?

Yes — that's what the Knowledge Management app is for. Every weekly digest gets filed there, tagged by competitor and date. Your floor manager can search 'Competitor A pricing' and pull up everything you've captured in the last six months without asking you.

Is my competitive research data stored securely? What about SOC 2?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. For most independent operators, the competitive data you're collecting here is public information — review text, social posts, website content — so the risk profile is low. If you're handling sensitive internal data alongside this, that's worth knowing.

How often does the X Mentions Tracker run, and will it catch a post that blows up overnight?

The X Mentions Tracker runs daily via browser automation. If a post goes viral overnight and you need real-time alerts, the daily sweep will catch it in the morning digest rather than in the moment. For most restaurant operators, same-day awareness is enough to act on.

I don't have PostHog — do I need it for the Growth Analyst app?

Growth Analyst is built around PostHog for traffic and conversion data. If you're running Google Analytics 4 instead, you can connect GA4 from Starch's integration catalog and describe a custom weekly traffic summary instead of using the Growth Analyst starter template directly. You'd tell Starch: 'Pull my GA4 data each week and email me which pages and referral sources drove the most reservation-page visits.'

Will this replace the gut feel I've built up from being in the neighborhood for ten years?

No, and it shouldn't try to. What it replaces is the lag — the two weeks between when a competitor launches something and when you happen to hear about it. You still make the call on how to respond. Starch just makes sure you're not making it blind.