Competitive Intelligence 101

I advise my portfolio companies to be careful about what information they make searchable publicly.  But on the other side, I definitely recommend seeing what information others have made public.

For each competitor, I suggest you do the following:

• Look on Angel.co for their pitch deck.  
• Look on Crunchbase.com and Pitchbook.com and see if they have any investors who are crowdfunding sites, e.g., Republic*. If so, look for any investor-facing information they uploaded there.  
• Run the following searches on Google or another search engine:
  • [company name] pitch deck
  • [company name] pitch video
  • [company name] Investor deck
  • [company name] investor video
  • [company name] Filetype:ppt
  • [company name] Filetype:pdf
  • [company name] Filetype:docx
  • [company name] Filetype:rtf
    And see if you find anything interesting.

For more ideas:

• Google Search by File Type: The File Extensions You Can Find Indexed on Google

Disclosure: A HOF Capital affiliate is an investor in Republic.