Inspiration, Not Imitation
Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Verna signs up for thousands of competitor products to study their flows, but warns that ripping their onboarding, pricing, or design wholesale fails ~95% of the time. You never know if you're seeing their real experience, a test cell, or a decade-old page nobody maintains. Copying is the fastest route to mediocrity; competitors are an input to your own ideation, research, and experimentation, never a shortcut around them.
Origin
Elena Verna's competitive-teardown practice (thousands of Gmail accounts, extensive Miro boards of competitor flows).
Core principles
- 01Copying competition is the fastest way to mediocrity because a leader separates from the pack
- 02You rarely see a competitor's true experience: it may be a test cell, personalized, or an unmaintained page
- 03Extract common elements and patterns across many competitors, not one company's flow
- 04Benchmarks are dangerous because every company defines metrics (sign-ups, visitors, conversion) differently
How to run it
- 1
Tear down many competitors, not one
Sign up across direct competitors and adjacent best-in-class products to see their monetization, activation, and onboarding. Use web archives to see how logged-out pages evolved.
Pro tip Look for elements that are 'always the same' across companies: recurring elements are the likely winning ones.
Watch out A single company's page may be a tester cell, personalized to your sign-up context, or a page they 'haven't touched in 10 years.'
- 2
Use competitors to solve the empty-canvas problem
For a defined problem (e.g. a sharing model), study how Slack, Figma, Miro, Notion, Google do it, extract the common elements, and use them as a starting input into ideation.
Pro tip Build reusable skeletons/prototypes (pricing page, homepage) of the elements you should include, then inject your own product's substance.
- 3
Never skip your own ideation, research, and testing
Take the extracted elements as a 60% starting point, then do the design, user research, customer interviews, and experimentation, and add your own innovation on top.
Watch out Never just slap your colors on a competitor's flow assuming 'if it works for them it works for us.'
- 4
Treat benchmarks as one input, not a target
Before adopting any benchmark, check the exact metric definition (all traffic vs. new traffic vs. new IP/persistent ID). Use it to gauge what's possible, not to set your target.
Watch out Blindly setting a benchmark derived from competitors is 'a sure way to fail' because definitions differ company to company.
In the wild
Someone praised a Dropbox activation-flow page and planned to copy it to their company. Verna's response: 'we haven't touched it in 10 years... it's only visible for a small cohort... it performs like [poorly]... please don't copy it.'
→ A cautionary case: the admired 'best-in-class' page was an unmaintained, low-performing artifact, not a deliberate design to emulate.
Common mistakes
Copying to skip the work
Ripping competitor flows to avoid ideation, user research, and A/B testing fails ~95% of the time and locks you into the middle of the pack.
Is it for you?
Best for
Growth and product teams designing flows (onboarding, pricing, sharing) who want a fast, informed starting point
Not ideal for
Teams looking for a copy-paste shortcut that avoids their own research and experimentation
From the transcript
“I use it as an input into ideation, but I never use it as a destination for the result.”
“copying competition is like the fastest way to mediocrity because you'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else”
“you don't even know if you're getting their actual experience or you use some tester cell”
“taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying this is where we should be is also so dangerous”
From the episode
10 growth tactics that never work
Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)