The Challenge
In banking, competitive intelligence is everything. Knowing when a rival launches a new product, poaches a key executive, or shifts pricing can mean the difference between leading the market and reacting too late.
The bank's strategy team was stuck in a manual loop:
- Analysts spent 15+ hours per week scanning LinkedIn, press releases, and job boards
- Intelligence reports were compiled in spreadsheets and delivered days after events happened
- Executive movements and strategic hires were often missed entirely
- No systematic way to track hiring patterns that signal competitor strategy shifts
- Insights were siloed — one analyst's findings rarely reached the right decision-makers in time
The core problem wasn't lack of information — it was the inability to collect, process, and act on competitive signals at the speed the market demands.
The Solution
I built TrueCompass — a real-time competitor intelligence platform that replaces manual research with continuous AI-powered monitoring.
How It Works
1. Competitor Setup Users add competitors by simply entering their website URL and specifying what to track: product launches, hiring patterns, pricing changes, market expansion, or executive movements. The platform handles the rest.
2. Continuous AI Monitoring The system continuously scans multiple data sources — LinkedIn profiles, job boards, company announcements, and market signals. It learns from user feedback to prioritize the intelligence that matters most.
3. Talent Tracking Real-time alerts when executives change companies, when competitors make strategic hires, or when hiring patterns suggest a new product line or market push. This is one of the strongest leading indicators of competitor strategy.
4. Market Intelligence Beyond people moves, TrueCompass tracks pricing shifts, new product launches, and competitive pivots — surfacing signals that might take weeks to discover manually.
5. Weekly Intelligence Reports AI-curated summaries delivered to inboxes, distilling the week's competitive landscape into actionable insights. No more spreadsheet-based reporting.
Technical Architecture
- Frontend: Next.js with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS for a fast, responsive dashboard
- AI Engine: Custom CrewAI flow orchestrating multiple agents for data collection, analysis, and report generation
- Data Pipeline: Automated collection from multiple sources with deduplication and relevance scoring
- Payments: Stripe integration with three subscription tiers (Starter, Professional, Enterprise)
- Hosting: Deployed on Vercel with edge functions for low-latency monitoring
Business Impact
What required 15+ analyst hours per week now runs continuously in the background, surfacing only the signals that matter.
Key Outcomes:
- Full SaaS platform delivered in approximately 3 months from concept to production
- Real-time alerting replacing weekly manual reports with instant notifications
- Multi-source intelligence combining LinkedIn, job boards, and market data into a single view
- Scalable architecture supporting monitoring of multiple competitors simultaneously
- Revenue-ready with Stripe-powered subscriptions across three pricing tiers (€15/€100/Custom)
Key Learnings
1. Talent Signals Are the Strongest Predictors Hiring patterns turned out to be the most valuable competitive signal. When a bank hires five blockchain engineers, that tells you more about their strategy than any press release.
2. Less Noise, More Signal Early versions surfaced too much raw data. The breakthrough came when we shifted to an AI-curated approach where only high-confidence, actionable intelligence reaches users.
3. Banking Requires Enterprise-Grade Trust Working with a financial institution meant meeting strict requirements around data handling, access controls, and audit trails — even for an intelligence platform that aggregates public data.
See It Live
Live Platform: truecompass.dev
Explore how TrueCompass helps organizations stay ahead of their competition with AI-powered intelligence.
Try it:
- Add a competitor's LinkedIn or website URL
- Specify what to track (hiring patterns, product launches, pricing changes)
- Receive real-time alerts when signals change
- Review weekly intelligence reports in your inbox