Weekly competitor brief.

A weekly competitor brief is a single email summarising a week of competitor activity. The good ones contain three things: the headline change (the most strategically important move), a pattern read (what shows up across multiple rivals), and a recommended action with a deadline. SpotRivals delivers this every Monday morning. The brief replaces the dashboard discipline that no founder maintains for more than six weeks.

What a brief looks like in practice

A typical Monday brief opens with the headline: “Acme cut Pro 20% and launched a free tier; they are aggressively targeting your core SMB segment.” Then three severity-tagged moves: a Critical (Acme’s price cut), an Important (a competitor adding AI analytics), a Worth-noting (a third rival publishing four enterprise-security posts in two weeks). Then a pattern callout (“Two of three competitors made pricing moves this month”) and a recommended action (“Update your comparison page this week to highlight features your rivals’ cheaper plans skip”).

Why a weekly format works (and daily doesn’t)

Daily emails get filtered. Real-time alerts get muted after the third week. Monthly summaries are too late to act on. Weekly is the cadence that fits the working rhythm of a small SaaS, agency, or DTC team: enough lead time to act before the rival’s move hits your funnel, infrequent enough to read on Monday with coffee. Critical moves (pricing changes, plan removals, major homepage rewrites) trigger an instant email regardless of the day, so the weekly cadence does not introduce a strategic blind spot. The brief is built to be read, decided on, and closed in five minutes; the dashboard is there if you want to dig in.