Building an Automated Competitive Intelligence Pipeline (Without Enterprise Pricing)

Last quarter, one of our competitors quietly shipped a feature that directly overlapped with what we'd been building for two months. I found out in a customer call. The customer asked why we were "behind" on something the competitor had already launched. I had no idea it existed. That was the moment I decided our competitor monitoring process — which was really just people sometimes pasting links in a Slack channel — needed to be replaced with something that actually worked. We tried the obvious fixes first. A shared Google Sheet with competitor URLs. A weekly review meeting. Assigned owners for each competitor. Each attempt lasted about two weeks before people stopped updating it. Turns out, "remember to check 10 websites every Monday" doesn't scale when everyone has actual work to do. I built a small system to watch competitor blogs and changelogs, filter the noise, and post the handful of real updates into Slack. Here's what broke, what finally held up, and what I'd do differently i