Jam AI
Using AI for Your Competitive Advantage
How to find your competitors, map your market, and use AI to stand apart. In plain English, for people who do not write code.
Do you know your top three competitors right now?
Most people only kind of do. By the end of this, you will know exactly who they are, and you will know how to find the ones you did not even realize you had.
I do competitive research every single week.
Before Jam AI, I spent about 15 years inside agencies building websites and running digital marketing and SEO. Now I teach non-technical business owners to actually use AI. I work with SCORE, the SBA and FedEx, and competitive research is something I do all the time.
What we'll cover.
- 1 How to find your competitors, including the ones you did not know about.
- 2 Three frameworks: Porter's Five Forces, the Competitive Matrix, and SWOT.
- 3 AI tools to benchmark any competitor in minutes.
- 4 How to spot the market gaps and white space.
- 5 Your value proposition, the one line that says why you are different.
Most people skip this part.
They are so excited about their own business, their brand, their products, that they never stop to look at who else is out there. But your customers already know your competitors. So you need to know them too, and you need to know how you stand apart.
You do not need to reinvent the wheel.
There is almost always someone already doing something well in your space. Study what is working for them, then add your own personality and spin to make it unmistakably yours.
Fiji water and Aquafina are both just water.
One sells a fresh waterfall and a feeling, and you will pay more for it. The other is fine, it does the job. Same product, totally different positioning. Pricing and branding are how they stand apart. How will you?
There is always room for your spin. But check first.
A friend of mine opened a pottery shop in Denver and hired me to make sure there was not one on every block. There were a few. Not empty, not crowded. The work was finding the angle that let her stand apart.
Three battle-tested frameworks.
These map your competitive landscape so you can see exactly where you fit and where the opening is.
Porter's Five Forces
How intense is the competition in your niche?
Competitive Matrix
Where is the crowd, and where is the white space?
SWOT
Your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Porter's Five Forces.
A simple way to measure how intense the competition really is in your specific niche. Five questions, and your whole market comes into focus.
How crowded is your space?
Think of reiki healers in New Orleans or wedding DJs in Chicago. Lots of them, in a small area. The more players, the harder you have to work to stand out on brand and price.
How easily can customers switch?
It comes down to price and attachment. Salons, massage, energy healing: the more a relationship is built, the harder it is to switch, even when someone cheaper shows up. Relationships are a moat.
Can customers solve it a different way?
Not a direct competitor, but a different path to the same result. The more unique and specific your offer, the fewer easy substitutes exist.
How easy is it for new players to jump in?
I was one of the first AI educators. Now there are new ones every week. What keeps me ahead is my testimonials, my credentials and my experience. Certifications and proof are your barrier to entry.
How much leverage do your suppliers have?
If a few suppliers control what you need, they have power over your costs. For a lot of service businesses this one barely applies, and that is good news.
The Competitive Matrix.
Plot quality from low to high against price from low to high, and drop your competitors onto it. Suddenly you can see how crowded the market is, and exactly where the white space is.
SWOT.
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Old school, still powerful. And honestly? I care about my weaknesses and threats more than my strengths every single time. That is where the real work is.
Four things to study on every competitor.
Pricing
High, low, or right in the middle?
Positioning
What promise and feeling do they sell?
Product & offer
What is their actual delivery model?
Experience
Reviews, support, happy customers?
Where do you land?
Are you coming in high, low, or right in the middle? Price is not just a number, it is a signal. Know where you sit before anyone asks.
"Talk about the destination, not the plane."
Sell how the customer will feel, the beach and the cold coconut drink, not the packing and the plane ride. So many businesses describe their process. Describe the result instead.
What are you actually giving them?
Your delivery model and your offer matter as much as the product itself. Alex Hormozi's book $100M Offers is all about framing the same thing in ways that feel completely different. Worth a read.
Are their customers actually happy?
Look at reviews, response times, and support quality. Are the employees happy? Is this a business that will be around in two years? Their experience gaps are your opening.
Where to research, no AI required.
The most powerful competitor tool I have used. Traffic, audience, and positioning at a glance.
LinkedIn linkedin.com ↗See a company's people, recent hires, and how active they are.
Capterra capterra.com ↗Real customer reviews and ratings, especially for software and services.
Glassdoor glassdoor.com ↗What a company's own employees say about working there.
Plus a plain Google search and Google reviews. Start there.
Three months and $5,000, in about 15 minutes.
At my old agency, a full competitive landscape report took us about three months and we charged around $5,000 for it. SimilarWeb does most of that in roughly fifteen minutes.
Open your top competitor's website.
Read their homepage headline. What promise are they leading with? What problem do they claim to solve, and who are they speaking to? Now ask yourself: can you make that promise better, or just different?
Even a crowded market has a corner for you.
- ✓ Are there underserved segments in your industry?
- ✓ Underserved geographies or specific price points?
- ✓ A competitor's bad reviews are a prospect, and a roadmap.
Being found is staying competitive.
People need to find you in search engines (SEO) and now in AI answers too (GEO, Generative Engine Optimization). If customers cannot find you, none of the rest matters.
Blogging is back, and FAQs are gold.
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini love blogs and FAQ sections. Add an FAQ to the bottom of every important page, and blog consistently. Just like SEO, it takes time and consistency, but it works.
Small things that move you ahead in search.
- ✓ Clean title tags and H1 headers on every page.
- ✓ Alt text on your images (a name and description).
- ✓ Keep it consistent. Tools like Wix, WordPress and Squarespace fill most of this in for you, you just have to check it is done.
Be everywhere. Cross-post everything.
AI models pull from all over: your website, Google, Reddit, Substack, Eventbrite, social. The bigger your footprint and the more places your content lives, the more often AI will reference you. Post it on your blog and everywhere else too.
Be memorable, and hard to copy.
Back to Fiji and Aquafina: make people feel something. Build a brand so distinctly yours that I could hand a competitor your business plan and dare them to copy you, and they could not, because they are not you.
Unhappy customers are your roadmap.
Bad reviews on your competitors show you exactly what not to do. Do the opposite, and you may have just found your next product, service, or angle.
Real testimonials only.
Creating fake testimonials with AI is against the law, with real penalties. A competitor once scraped my testimonials and posted fake versions on his own site. Use real proof, always. It is both the right thing and the safe thing.
Your value proposition.
We help [specific customer] who struggles with [specific problem] to [specific outcome], unlike competitors who [blank].
It is your elevator pitch and your differentiator in two sentences.
"We help first-generation restaurant owners who struggle with food-cost control hit 28% or below, unlike generic accounting software that was not built for kitchens."
See how it says what you do and how you are different, all at once? That is the goal.
Here's how I actually do all of this with AI.
The frameworks are the thinking. These AI tools are how I run them in minutes instead of months.
Meet Manus.
Manus is a powerful AI research agent. It is not your everyday chatbot, it is built for deep investigation. Give it a competitor and it will research for twenty to thirty minutes, dig across the whole web, and cite every source. Free to start, with paid plans for heavy use.
Manus manus.im ↗Autonomous AI agent for deep competitive research.
One prompt, a full intelligence report.
Show: the finished Manus white paper. Walk the threat-level table, the competitor profiles, and the top three takeaways. Point out that it cites every source as it goes.
An 18-page report, seven competitors.
- ✓ A threat-level table ranking every competitor at a glance.
- ✓ Clear opportunity gaps: a competitor based overseas left a whole lane open for me; another closed her community, leaving thousands of people with nowhere to go.
- ✓ My biggest differentiator, named back to me: the JAM Method, Just Start, Automate, Monetize.
Show: the second Manus run, where it applied today's frameworks (Porter's, the matrix, SWOT, market-gap, value prop) to my own business and full digital footprint, then wrote my value proposition for me.
Build your AI advisory board.
In Claude (or ChatGPT or Gemini), I built a roundtable of business minds I would never get in a room with: Alex Hormozi, Gary Vee, Brené Brown, Amy Porterfield. I feed it my competitive research and ask how to stand apart, and each one answers in their real style.
Show: the roundtable answering "how do I stand apart?" Hormozi tears apart the wordy value prop, Gary Vee says post more, Brené asks how it really feels, Amy says the differentiator is buried. Then read the summary.
It's a Skill. You make it once.
- 1 In Claude or ChatGPT, type / and choose Skills → Skill Creator.
- 2 Say: "Build me an executive roundtable with [your people]. I'll share my business problems and want custom feedback from each, plus a summary."
- 3 Save it. Now you can call your board any day in one click.
🔴 Live demo: open Skill Creator and start one.
I built this whole training page with AI.
This page, the one you are looking at, I built with Manus in about fifteen minutes. That is the real lesson: while your competitors talk about AI, you can use it to actually pull ahead.
The whole hour, in five lines.
- 1 Know your competitors. Your customers already do.
- 2 Run the three frameworks: Five Forces, Matrix, SWOT.
- 3 Benchmark with AI: pricing, positioning, offer, experience.
- 4 Find the white space, even in a crowded market.
- 5 Write the one-line value proposition that says why you.
Your competitive-research toolkit.
Deep competitor research and white papers.
Claude claude.ai ↗My go-to for the roundtable and Skills.
SimilarWeb similarweb.com ↗A full landscape view in minutes.
LinkedIn linkedin.com ↗Company people, hires and activity.
Capterra capterra.com ↗Customer reviews and ratings.
Glassdoor glassdoor.com ↗What employees say from the inside.
ChatGPT chatgpt.com ↗Another great home for Skills and research.
Gemini gemini.google.com ↗Try the same prompts with Deep Research.
Build it all inside Club Jam.
We do exactly this every week, step by step, in plain English, with live help. Bring your business and we will make AI work for it.
Join Club Jam 🧡
Scan the code or tap the button. 7-day free trial.