Prompt Playbook: Leapfrogging Competitors using AI PART 1
🐸 Leapfrogging Competitors using AI
One of the biggest lies first-time entrepreneurs believe is that their idea has to be unique.
That they need to be revolutionaries. That they need to break the mould.
I blame Steve Jobs and the myth of the mad scientist-inventor style founder.
Do unique unicorn ideas exist? Yeah sure. But they are in the minority. That’s why people pay so much attention to them! They are fundamentally good stories because they are so unique!
People don’t write hagiographic (what a GREAT word) books about “normal” businesses. Businesses that don’t do anything revolutionary but still make a good chunk of money.
Because the truth is…most ideas are not new.
There’s very little new under the sun. And anyone who thinks they’ve got a brand new business idea probably just hasn’t looked hard enough!
We've all been sold this lie. That success means creating something entirely new. Finding that mythical "blue ocean" where there's no competition.
But here's what actually works: find something that's already succeeding and make it better for a specific group of people.
I know, I know. That sounds like copying. But stick with me here.
Think about the most successful businesses you know. Even the unicorns.
Uber didn't invent taxis—they made hailing one less terrible. Airbnb didn't invent room rentals—they made it less sketchy. Stripe didn't invent payment processing—they made it developer-friendly.
In this Playbook I'm going to show you how to systematically analyse what's already winning in your market and engineer something better. Not by adding more features or dropping your price, but by understanding exactly what customers actually want that they're not getting.
We’re going to look at competitors, work out what they are doing, and use that to leapfrog them.
Let’s get started
Summary
Forget Blue Ocean, Think Leapfrog
Why chasing uniqueness is usually a trap
The "leapfrog" strategy that actually works
Learning from SEO: why better beats different
Cross-pollination: stealing what works from other industries
Setting up your competitive intelligence system
The Uniqueness Trap
Every accelerator, every business book, every well-meaning advisor tells you the same thing: "What's your unique value proposition? How are you different?"
This sends entrepreneurs on wild goose chases trying to invent problems that don't exist. They create "solutions" so unique that they have to spend all their time educating the market about why they even need it.
Meanwhile, less creative entrepreneurs are quietly making fortunes by taking existing solutions and making them 10% better for specific audiences.
The market has already validated the problem. Customers are already spending money. You just need to serve them better than the current options.
One of the biggest red flags when I talk to someone who wants my assistance or investment is when they say that their idea is “brand new” or “totally different”.
Very (very) rarely will people come up with something actually unique.
More likely someone has come up with the idea before and the market just didn’t give a damn…
That’s market risk - a market that’s unreceptive to what you are offering.
Only HUGE companies can deal with market risk by spending (a lot) educating the market on the new offer. Think Coca Cola Vanilla…and even Coca Cola couldn’t spend their way into making people want that…
Dealing with market risk is almost impossible for small outfits. Instead we want to deal with competition risk - the existence of competitors. This is because the existence of competitors at least means that there is a market!
The SEO Lesson
What we want to do is find something that works.
And do it better.
There's a concept in SEO that perfectly illustrates this. Brian Dean is an SEO guru guy - worth checking his stuff if you want to rank a site. If he wanted to rank for competitive keywords, he didn't try to create completely new types of content.
He found what was already ranking and made it better.
His "Skyscraper Technique" was simple: find popular content, make something superior, then promote it. Not different—better.
But here's where people misunderstand: "better" doesn't always mean bigger. Sometimes better means:
More concise (when everything else is bloated)
More actionable (when everything else is theoretical)
More comprehensive (when everything else is surface-level)
Different format (video when everything else is text)
Better support (community when everything else is DIY)
The key is understanding what "better" means to your specific audience.
And find out what better is will be the focus of this Playbook - we’re going to look at what our competitors offer, what their customers like and (importantly) what they don’t like. And we’ll use this to calibrate our own offer and leapfrog competitors.
Your Leapfrog Strategy
Over the next four Parts, I'll show you exactly how to
Choose the right competitor offer to analyze (not their whole funnel—one specific offer)
Systematically extract what makes it work using AI
Gather intelligence from their marketing and positioning
Mine customer feedback for what people really want
Engineer your leapfrog offer based on real gaps
We're not guessing what might work. We're reverse-engineering what already does, then making it better for our specific audience.
Setting Up Your Snooping
Before we dive deep, you need to set up your competitive intelligence system. This isn't complex—just organised. We don’t want to end up with reams of notes all over the place because eventually we’re going to pull everything together to construct our own offer.
Create a new ChatGPT or Claude project called something like "Competitive Intelligence - [Your Industry]".
Or “Super Secret Spying Project CLASSIFIED” if you want.
Are mine called things like that?…maybe…
This becomes your central repository for everything we discover. No more scattered notes or forgotten insights. Projects is perfect for this kinda of structured assessment without having to build a whole app, agent or workflow. (Although if you want to do this at scale, or for clients, you could do this too).
As we work through this process, you'll build a systematic understanding of what wins in your market. More importantly, you'll see the gaps that everyone else is missing.
What's Next?
Tomorrow, we'll dive into Part 2: deconstructing your first competitor offer. I'll show you how to legally and (sorta!) ethically get inside their actual product, map out exactly how it works, and use AI to extract insights you'd never spot manually.
The goal isn't to copy—it's to understand.
A (rare) corporate word I love for this is “best practices”. Fancy term for nicking ideas!
Keep Prompting,
Kyle