Synthiz for competitive intelligence

The problem: intelligence that costs a lot and gets abandoned

Competitive intelligence nearly always fails the same way. Someone sets up an RSS reader, stacks forty sources, and three weeks later the counter reads 1,200 unread. Someone configures Google Alerts, which mostly surface noise and aggregators. Someone hands a weekly press review to an intern, and nobody really reads it.

The underlying problem is a throughput mismatch. A serious competitor publishes a blog post a week, a webinar a month, a press release a quarter, appears on two or three industry podcasts, and sends their head of product to speak at conferences. Multiply that by five tracked competitors: around thirty items a month, well over half of them audio or video — which is to say, never consumed, because nobody blocks an hour to watch a competitor's webinar.

And the audiovisual material is precisely the richest. A press release is calibrated. An hour of webinar where a product lead answers live customer questions says infinitely more about the real roadmap, the objections they hit and the segments they are chasing.

The last trap is memory. A competitor announces a strategic shift. Were they saying the same thing a year ago? Nobody knows, because a year-old content was never kept in any reusable form.

The workflow with Synthiz

1. One memoire per competitor, or one per intelligence theme. "Competitor A", or "Market pricing positioning" if you would rather follow a subject across several players.
2. Subscribe to their channels. RSS for the blog and the newsroom, the YouTube channel carrying webinars and demos, the company podcast. Sync is automatic and content arrives transcribed and summarised, including the hour-long webinar you would never have watched.
3. Add by hand what has no feed. An annual report PDF, a press interview, a conference appearance. The Chrome extension saves the open page in one click.
4. Check the history the moment the announcement lands. This is the most useful move of the day. You are reading a competitor's post on LinkedIn: from the extension, a search in your own base shows you the excerpt around the term, without leaving the tab. You know immediately whether they were already saying this eight months ago, or whether it is a genuine shift.
5. Run the review from the summaries, not the full sources. Twenty items a month can be worked through in thirty minutes in that form.
6. Cross-analyse several competitors over the same quarter. The cross-analysis surfaces convergences — three players adopting the same vocabulary is a market movement — tensions, and above all blind spots: what nobody talks about is often the space that is open.
7. Record your thoughts as you read: a hypothesis about their roadmap, a perceived change of target, an argument to prepare for sales. Each thought stays anchored to the sources behind it.
8. Verify before circulating. Timestamped citations let you say "he said it at minute 34" rather than "apparently". That matters as soon as an intelligence note travels internally.
9. Export to Markdown or PDF for your quarterly note or your battle card.

What it changes in practice

Intelligence item	Before	With Synthiz
Competitor blog	RSS reader saturated, unread	Summary available on arrival
One-hour webinar	Never watched	Transcribed and summarised automatically
Industry podcast	Heard by chance	Processed systematically
History of a message	Lost	Searched from the extension, mid-read
Market movement	Noticed late	Surfaced as convergence across players

The decisive gain is access to the audio and video layer. That is where competitors speak most freely, and it is exactly the part traditional intelligence leaves aside for lack of time.

The honest limits

It is not a pricing-intelligence or page-monitoring tool. No change detection on a pricing page, no job posting tracking, no automated feature comparison, no scheduled screenshots. Visualping, Kompyte or Crayon do that job; Synthiz processes editorial content.

No pushed alerts. Nothing arrives in your inbox or in Slack. Content settles into the memoire, already processed, and you come to it. For crisis monitoring, where minutes count, this is the wrong tool.

No closed sources. Anything that is not public or reachable by a link stays out: a competitor's customer portal, a paid analyst subscription, what your sales team hears in the field. Those channels are often the most informative, and they will pass you by.

No teamwork. No shared intelligence base, no distribution to internal subscribers, no per-team permissions. An intelligence function that has to feed marketing, sales and product will export and redistribute by hand.

A summary is not competitive analysis. The tool summarises what was said and surfaces connections; it does not tell you what that means for your strategy, or whether to react. Judgement stays human, and judgement is the part with value.

Summaries contain approximations. They are produced by language models. Before a competitor figure ships in a sales battle card, it has to be re-checked in the original citation.

Nothing on compliance. No guardrails on what you may collect or redistribute. Copyright and the rules governing competitive intelligence stay entirely on your side.