One competitor, one hour, one deck
By Owen Fisher·Updated 24 July 2026·8 min read
A single competitor teardown fits in about an hour: one opening question, five key pages captured on desktop and phone, notes pinned on the evidence, and a ten slide deck shared by link. This worked example walks the whole process, with Stravue handling the capture so the hour goes on thinking.
The brief
One rival. One hour. A deck you could show a manager tomorrow morning. That is the whole brief, and it is deliberately small. A teardown of one competitor is the fastest competitive study there is, and it is the shape most other studies grow from. This example walks it end to end so you can copy the process this afternoon, with any capture method you like. Stravue is the fast path, not the only one.
Start with the question, not the tab
Before opening the competitor's site, write one sentence that says what you want to learn. "How does their homepage earn trust before asking for a signup?" or "What does their pricing page do that ours does not?". The question decides which pages matter, what to pin, and when you are done. Without it you get a scrapbook, not a study. The complete teardown guide covers how to sharpen this question.
Capture the five pages, desktop and phone
The five-page framework covers most of a competitor's strategy: homepage, pricing, the main product page, the signup flow, and their proof pages. Capture all five before you form a single opinion. Sites change without notice, and a dated capture holds still while you think.
Capture each page twice: once at desktop width, once at phone width. The phone version is often a different page in all but name. Shorter headline, cut sections, a different call to action. When the two disagree, that disagreement usually becomes one of your best slides. In Stravue, paste the site and what you're after, pick from the proposed pages, and both versions arrive as clean full-page captures with cookie banners and chat widgets removed.
The teardown, step by step
- 1
Write the opening question
One sentence, written down before anything else. It names what you want to learn and gives the deck its first slide. If you cannot write it, you are not ready to capture.
- 2
Capture the five key pages
Homepage, pricing, product, signup, proof. Desktop and phone for each. By hand this is the slow part; with Stravue you paste the site, pick the proposed pages, and the captures arrive in minutes.
- 3
Pin what you notice, on the pixel
Number your observations directly on the captures. "Price anchored against the top tier", "no product screenshot above the fold", "trust logos before the first claim". A pin on the exact spot beats a paragraph in a separate document.
- 4
Label observation and interpretation separately
"The trial button repeats five times" is an observation. "They are betting everything on self-serve" is an interpretation. Keep both, but mark which is which. The room trusts you more when you show the seam.
- 5
Assemble the ten slide deck
One capture per slide, pins visible, one takeaway line underneath. Open with the question and your answer, close with at most three moves. Export to PowerPoint or PDF when someone needs a file.
- 6
Hand it off with a share link
Send a read-only link instead of an attachment. Anyone can open it without signing up, on any device, and it always shows the current version of the deck.
Pinning: where the thinking happens
Work through the captures in page order and pin as you go. A useful pass typically surfaces things like where the first call to action sits, how soon pricing appears, what the site asks for before showing value, and which claims come with proof attached. You are not hunting for verdicts yet. You are collecting evidence your later argument can stand on.
Then do a second pass for meaning. This is where the observation versus interpretation discipline pays off. Every interpretation should point back at a numbered pin someone can see. That traceability is what makes the deck hard to argue with.
The ten slide deck
- Slide 1: the question and your one-line answer.
- Slides 2 to 3: their homepage, desktop then phone, with pins.
- Slides 4 to 5: pricing, with the featured plan and framing pinned.
- Slides 6 to 7: product page and signup flow.
- Slide 8: proof pages, and what they lean on.
- Slide 9: the desktop and phone mismatch, if you found one.
- Slide 10: at most three moves, each pointing at a slide just shown.
Ten slides is a ceiling, not a target. The full slide order logic is in how to present competitor research.
Where the hour goes
The honest maths of a single-site teardown: by hand, capture eats most of the hour and thinking gets the scraps. With the capture step tooled, the ratio flips.
| Task | By hand | With Stravue |
|---|---|---|
| Capture five pages at desktop width | About 20 minutes of scrolling, stitching and re-shooting | Part of one capture run, a few minutes |
| Capture the same five at phone width | About 20 minutes more, in a resized window | The same run captures both, no extra work |
| Remove cookie banners and chat widgets from shots | About 10 minutes of re-shooting or cropping | Removed during capture |
| File, name and order the screenshots | About 10 minutes in folders | Already organised, in order |
| Pin notes and build the deck | Whatever is left, usually not much | Nearly the whole hour |
The handoff
End the hour by sending the deck, not by promising it. A read-only share link opens without a signup, so a manager, client or teammate sees the annotated captures exactly as you left them. When someone needs a file for their own slides, export the deck as PowerPoint or PDF, or pull clean PNGs of individual captures. When one competitor is not enough, the same process scales sideways: see the five pricing pages side by side example.