Market and Competitor Research with ProfileSpider
Use ProfileSpider to build market and competitor research lists from directories, marketplaces, company websites, and search results for founders, analysts, consultants, and product teams.
Audience
Who This Is For
This page is for founders, product teams, analysts, consultants, marketers, and investors who need to map a market or a competitor set from public web sources.
Use it when you are sizing a category, building a competitive landscape, tracking new entrants, mapping a marketplace, or assembling a list of companies and players to analyze.
The problem
Why Market and Competitor Research Gets Messy
Market maps rarely start from one clean dataset. Useful signals are spread across directories, marketplaces, review sites, company websites, funding lists, conference pages, and search results. Each shows a different slice of the landscape.
One source shows company names and categories. Another shows products, pricing, or positioning. A marketplace shows sellers and ratings. Manually compiling all of that into a consistent, comparable landscape takes hours and goes stale quickly.
ProfileSpider helps turn public market sources into structured research lists. You open a source page, extract visible companies or profiles, save the rows to a list, enrich where useful, add tags and notes, and export the final landscape file.
Before ProfileSpider
What This Looks Like Manually
A manual market research workflow usually looks like this:
Search for companies in a category by niche, market, product, or region.
Open directories, marketplaces, review sites, search results, and company websites one by one.
Copy company names, categories, websites, descriptions, locations, and source URLs into a spreadsheet.
Open company websites to capture positioning, products, or team context.
Clean the spreadsheet, remove irrelevant rows, review duplicates, and tag by segment.
Share the landscape for strategy, product, investment, or competitive analysis.
Manual market mapping works for a few companies. It breaks down when you need to map a whole category, region, or competitor set and keep it current.
With ProfileSpider
How the Market and Competitor Research Workflow Works
Extract companies from public sources, organize them by segment, enrich where useful, and export a comparable landscape.
- 1
Define the market or competitor set
Start with a clear scope, such as analytics SaaS vendors, DTC coffee brands, AI sales tools, or marketplace sellers in a category.
- 2
Open a market source page
Use public directories, marketplaces, review sites, category pages, conference listings, Google results, or company websites that contain repeated companies or listings.
- 3
Extract visible company data
Run ProfileSpider on the page. One page scrape uses one credit. The extension turns visible company names, categories, websites, descriptions, locations, profile links, and source URLs into structured rows.
- 4
Save companies to a research list
Save the extracted rows to a focused list. Use tags such as segment:analytics, type:competitor, type:adjacent, region:eu, or watchlist to keep the landscape filterable.
- 5
Review and segment the landscape
Remove irrelevant companies, add notes, group by segment, and review duplicates inside the saved list. ProfileSpider can help identify duplicates within already-saved profiles through exact matches across stored fields.
- 6
Enrich eligible rows
Use enrichment on eligible rows when you want to fill missing details from website or profile URLs. Bulk enrichment runs across eligible profiles, uses 1 credit per URL, and is scoped to one URL type at a time.
- 7
Export the market landscape file
Export the reviewed list as CSV, Excel, or JSON. You can rename export headers once and reuse those labels on future exports.
Sources
Where to Find Market and Competitor Data
Output
Example Market Landscape Export
A useful market research file should keep company details, segment, positioning context, source links, tags, and notes together.
| Company | Segment | Website | Category | Location | Tags | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northstar Analytics | Analytics SaaS | northstaranalytics.example | Product Analytics | London, UK | segment:analytics, type:competitor, reviewed | Direct competitor; mid-market focus | vendor-directory.example/analytics |
| Weber Insights | Analytics SaaS | weberinsights.example | BI Dashboards | Berlin, Germany | segment:analytics, type:adjacent | Adjacent player; partnership potential | review-site.example/bi-tools |
| Cartergrove Data | Analytics SaaS | cartergrove.example | Data Pipelines | Amsterdam, Netherlands | segment:analytics, watchlist | New entrant; track funding and launches | marketplace.example/data-tools |
Workflows
Best ProfileSpider Workflows for Market and Competitor Research
Use these workflows to move from public market sources to a structured, comparable landscape.
Enrich a Company List
Add missing details from eligible company websites or profile URLs where enrichment is available.
Scrape Marketplace Seller Listings
Map sellers and vendors in a marketplace category into a structured landscape.
Build a Supplier or Vendor List
Map vendors and providers in a category from trade directories and listings.
Export Website Profiles to CSV
Extract company and people profiles from any public page and export them to CSV.
Clean and Deduplicate a Lead List
Review rows, remove irrelevant companies, and deduplicate before finalizing the landscape.
Questions