There's nothing quite like WallPawtector on the market. That's the whole point — we built it because the problem existed and nothing solved it properly.
But being one of a kind creates an odd blind spot. Most small brands keep tabs on the competition by watching a handful of rivals: what they charge, what they're promoting, what customers say about them. We don't really have rivals in that sense. Nobody else makes what we make.
What we do have is a category. Our customers are shopping for pet home goods — feeders, gates, crates, mats, beds — and they're making decisions in that context whether or not any of those products does what ours does. When several brands in the category run a sale in the same week, or when one of them lands on a message that clearly resonates with pet owners, that tells us something useful about the people we're trying to reach.
So we started watching the category instead of watching competitors.
We use a tool called Compvu to do it. It monitors a set of adjacent pet brands and flags what's actually changing — pricing moves, promotions, new products, stock levels, what customers are saying in reviews, and what those brands are running as ads. It comes as one short summary each morning instead of a dashboard we'd have to remember to check.
It's been more useful than we expected. A few things we've picked up:
Discounting tends to move in waves. When several brands in the category promote at once, a full-price product feels expensive by comparison — even one nobody else sells. Worth knowing before planning a launch.
Reviews are the best free research available. Reading what pet owners praise and complain about in adjacent products tells us more about what this audience cares about than any survey we could run.
Ads reveal what's working. When a brand runs the same message dozens of times, they've already paid to learn that it converts. We can read the result without paying for the test.
Compvu wrote up the broader idea — what competitive intelligence looks like for a brand with no direct competitor — using our category as the example. If you run a business in a similar spot, it's worth a read:
Competitive Intelligence When You Have No Direct Competitors
Full disclosure: WallPawtector and Compvu share a founder. We use it because it solves a real problem for us, and figured it was worth explaining why.