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"Denis Duvauchelle is CEO and co-founder of Twoodo, helping your team organize itself using simple #hashtags.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThe essence of innovation and the foundation of many start-ups are to imitate and adapt from existing concepts. New ideas are mostly incremental improvements of past ideas, just as we as a biological species have evolved improvements over centuries. We at Twoodo are trying to make team collaboration tools a little bit better, for example.\r\nOne thing that never gets old in business is knowing your customer - and that\u2019s because of how often we get it wrong. Too often we rely on our narrow worldview to inform us of who we think would use our product or service.\r\nData-gathering from scratch is a daunting prospect. The good news is that with a little research, you\u2019ll find that a lot of this data has been gathered for you.\r\nYou just need to know where to look. Often times it\u2019s not very far from your competitors.\r\n\r\n1. Borrow their Twitter followers\r\nUnless you\u2019ve entered a \u201Cblue ocean market,\u201D it\u2019s likely that there are at least 10 other more successful companies doing what you are trying to do right now.\r\nBut that\u2019s OK! That means there are ten companies with curated lists of people interested in your kind of service.\r\nThis is where the hijacking of open social platforms come in. Twitter is a famous example. Just click on the \u201Cfollowers\u201D list of your competitor\u2019s company and you have a list of Twitter handles worth getting to know.\r\nIf you just want to get a list of the top influencers of an account, use this tool to generate the data. If you want more comprehensive data on your competitors\u2019 followers you can use this tool. It is important to make connections with influencers early on so they can be evangelists for your brand.\r\n\r\nSimilarly, on Google+ you can go to a page and click to see who the followers of a brand are. It\u2019s pretty easy to link up with them, and once you are, G+ allows you to send email notifications to them of your updates or shared news.\r\nI\u2019m not suggesting you should contact them to spam them or tell them your service is better. But starting a conversation and finding out why they love or are frustrated by your competitors is a great way to find vital information. You\u2019d be surprised at how many people are willing to share their experiences.\r\nHere\u2019s a cool article on how to growth hack Google Plus if you want to harness its full growing potential!\r\n\r\n2. Spy on their feature requests\r\nWant to make sure that your new app doesn\u2019t fall into the same traps as your competitors once did? Check out their \u201Cfeature request\u201D lists and past FAQs to get an idea of what users/customers are finding challenging.\r\nDo this by simply going to your preferred search engine and typing \u201CCOMPANY feature request.\u201D\r\nYou can create an improved business by avoiding the mistakes made by your competitor in the past, and also try to get ahead by offering features that users are requesting (but have not been developed yet). Totally legit and totally serving the user.\r\n\r\n3. Win over their haters\r\nIt\u2019s as simple as typing \u201CI hate XXX\u201D into Topsy and seeing who hates the company and why. This is also a good way of discovering features people hate/love/want and incorporating the info into your business.\r\nGrab their Twitter handle and offer them your far superior service! Careful not to become their next punching bag!\r\n&amp;amp;nbsp;\r\n4. Take advantage of their inability to be everywhere\r\nThis won\u2019t pose much of a challenge in North America, where English and Spanish covers pretty much the whole population. However, step outside of that bubble into Europe, Africa and Asia and you\u2019ll find that an almost-copycat service done in a local language is niche enough to make you a sweet business.\r\nHere\u2019s an early example:\r\n\r\nTuenti launched in Spain as the Spanish social network when Facebook was only just allowing 13-year-old school kids on in the USA.\r\nSpain has a population of (give or take) 50 million - more than enough people for the founders to enjoy a good income. This proves that, if nothing else, you can use language as your niche.\r\n\r\n5. ...and their inability to do everything\r\nMergers and acquisitions anyone? This is another area where your research on the FAQs and feature requests is useful.\r\nBuild a company or develop features fulfilling a need that the your large competitors have. Then, negotiate a partnership or buy each other out.\r\nA famous examples is eBay buying PayPal and iBazar (a European online marketplace), therefore acquiring a payments system plus a continent worth of customers that it could convert to eBay users.\r\nYou will have to be fast on your feet if you decide to take this route, in case the company in mind is large enough to build a solution itself.\r\n\r\n6. Borrow their demographic data\r\nData on visitors and customers is being generated in gigantic quantities. And it\u2019s not limited to websites - there are startups developing ways to use street cameras to analyze who goes into shops.\r\nAlthough much of this data is hidden or protected by law, there are some tidbits available online that can give you some insights into your target market. For example, if you are targeting US women then not being on Pinterest is crazy. Pinterest has an audience of 80 percent women, and 20 percent of all American women are on it.\r\nThere are other kinds of data available to assist in building your information about potential users, if you persevere on the search engines. If you are a game company, it is interesting to know that people who play Candy Crush do it from 6 to 9 PM and on Sundays.\r\nThis is important for your marketing efforts and for your live customer support. Here\u2019s one way of finding out about the users of your competitors:\r\n\r\n\r\n\tChoose a social networking platform (we\u2019ll use G+ here)\r\n\tGo to the page of your competitor\r\n\tClick on the \u201Chave them in circles\u201D number on the right\r\n\tCheck out the list of fans, complete with contact details, geographic location, email (often), hobbies, and tons of awesome qualitative customer info\r\n\r\n\r\nA recent experiment I did with Facebook also brought some interesting results. I joined an interest group (Arduino boards), and clicked \u201Cadd friend\u201D on all the members that had the option available (which was plenty).\r\nQuite a lot added me back after a quick message to check that I was a legit person. Once I had connected with a large enough sample from the group, I was able to find such data as age, gender, location, industry and so on.\r\nThis is gold when you are trying to figure out who your ideal customer is.\r\n\r\n7. Hijack their search engine rankings\r\nIf you do a Google search for your keywords you\u2019ll probably see a bunch of competitors on the first page results. If they\u2019re on the first page then they must be doing something right with their backlink strategy. Imagine how powerful it would be if your site had the same backlinks as not only the first result but every single one of the top 10 results!\r\nThis is possible with a few steps and a bit of elbow grease. The good news is that you can see precisely the backlink strategy these competitors are using.\r\nIt\u2019s possible to find all the websites, blogs, forums or online magazines your competitors are getting their links from. Once you\u2019ve got that list it\u2019s up to you to get busy and replicate them by commenting on the same blog posts, asking for guest posts from the same blogs, posting on the same forums and so on.\r\nMatthew Woodward has created a complete comprehensive guide to this growth hack.\u00A0You\u2019ll soon be appearing in the top 10 results for your targeted keywords - and apparently it can even survive Google\u2019s algorithm updates.\r\nThis is long-term SEO with a strong foundation - a useful habit to begin with early.\r\n\r\nIs there anything I shouldn\u2019t steal (I mean, borrow)?\r\nBeing \u201Cinspired by\u201D or \u201Cadopting features of\u201D other businesses is common practice. It\u2019s costly and difficult to fight legal battles against anyone who decides to take your idea and run with it. Patent laws are not equally enforced around the world and it\u2019s pretty hard to keep your secret sauce secret on the internet.\r\nEven giants like Samsung and Apple are not above such controversy. Uber has allegedly poached drivers from competitors by calling up and canceling cabs (thus acquiring the driver\u2019s number) and then offering them a job with them.\r\nHow wrong was this? I\u2019m not sure. Marketplace ethics are a grey area.\r\nTop image credit: Shutterstock/Peshkova"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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