Not on homepages. Homepages are where companies write what they wish were true.
Reviews. G2, Capterra, Reddit threads, your own support tickets. Least glamorous hour of this exercise and reliably the most useful. Buyers describe problems in words no marketing team would approve, and those words are almost always better than yours.
Pricing pages. These say more about how a company actually positions itself than the hero does. The hero is aspiration. Pricing is the bet.
Sales decks. Ask a friendly customer what your competitor sent them. People share these more readily than you'd expect.
When you pull competitor language, copy the exact words. Don't paraphrase. Paraphrasing smooths out the overlap, and the overlap is the entire point.
Do this over two weeks
Build the Category Wall. Ten to twelve competitors, the ones your buyers actually name rather than the list you'd write from memory. For each: headline, subhead, three main claims. All in one document, then grouped by theme. The clusters show you which ground is crowded, and it's more crowded than you expect.
Run the 4 C's. Koto's strategists use this as groundwork: category, competition, customer, company. It's a checklist to stop you researching only the fun parts.
Talk to five to eight customers. Thirty minutes each. Three questions carry most of the weight.
What were you doing about this before you found us?
What almost stopped you from buying?
How did you describe us internally when you had to get budget approved?
That last one is the good one. It's your positioning, already written, by someone who had something at stake when they wrote it.
Note the empty spaces. What is nobody saying? Sometimes it's empty because nothing's there. Sometimes because everyone missed it. You won't know yet. Write it down.
