The Competitive Intelligentsia

‍“It's important to stay current and up to date… not read yesterday's newspaper. That's why we think you need data for what's going on right now, not a week ago. By that point, it's too old.” Josh Wilson, CEO of Particl‍

Way back in the early aughts, as a junior software engineer in my first direct-to-consumer startup, part of my job was building apps that checked in on our products across the internet. 

The “compliance team” was really just a grizzled older woman named Dee, who spent the bulk of her career as a catalog affiliate, and me, a kid who knew how to write PHP. She knew all of the tricks, because she made a metric eff-ton of money by exploiting brands just like ours.

Our “watchdog” apps — in our parlance — ensured our partners were adhering to compliance.

It turned out that many of those apps that checked for MAP pricing, discounting, and Amazon competition were also easily adapted to aggregate our competitor’s offerings into a “data lake” (lol it was actually just a ginormous single-table MySQL database). From it, we could extrapolate how the industry was taking shape:

• Average reviews
• Cadence of product launches
• Pricing updates
• Sitewide sales and advertised discounts

We would trade messages on AIM about our competitors and their motives. I fancied us the “competitive intelligentsia” within the business, even if my main job was to support the dot-com site and our growing team of developers and QA.

Sometimes, if it was urgent, she’d call me up — usually right at the end of the work day. 

“Something’s not right, Philly,” she’d say with the raspy tone that only unfiltered Pall Malls can give you. I’d have been mad that she called me Philly, if she wasn’t always right. “I’m seeing everyone else launching echinacea, what do they know?” or some other type of thing that I had no answers for, but I was all-too-keen to entertain.

Working with Dee gave me an insight into how brands sell and merchandise, and how competitors copycat each other. She had the “X” factor that is so often missing in the eCom circles: she had intuition.

‍The tools I built helped her to confirm what she already knew in her gut.

Dee’s intuition came from years of experience, something that I came to trust, and I’d often stay late pulling reports for Dee. We were a great team. I wrote a bunch of “watchdogs” that kept our business competitive, until it finally was acquired in 2012, and I went on to help build the eCom practice at Something Digital, where I used that intuition for the world’s most recognizable brands.

So, when I sat down with Josh Wilson from Particl on the podcast a few weeks back, it made me think of Dee. Particl is part of a new type of industry-centric data products that do the hard work that our “watchdog” apps did, but they can do it on a larger scale. Thanks to platforms like Shopify, and the prevalence of APIs nowadays, getting real-time(ish) data like Dee and I used to do is quite simple. The “scraping” of sites isn’t as laborious, it seems, and more of these types of products are springing up that make gaining this intuition about our industry, and the competitive motions within it, so much easier to gain.

Particl is surely no replacement for having a Dee on your team. But it might help you to become part of the “competitive intelligentsia” in your business.

Listen to my conversation with Josh over on the most recent episode of the Future Commerce podcast, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

And don’t. Ever. Call. Me. Philly.

— Phillip

P.S. This is not a sponsored post by Particl. But they *did* sponsor the podcast a while back, FYI. So if you’re interested in checking it out, it helps us out to use this link: https://particl.com/futurecommerce 

And when you talk to them, ask them why they have a quote from Nik on the Future Commerce landing page, lol.