What is competitive intelligence?
Competitive intelligence is the habit of collecting and reading, in an ordered and consistent way, the public information about your competitors to make better decisions. It isn’t spying or hacking: it’s looking at what they publish themselves —prices, menu, hours, promotions, reviews, job postings— and turning that noise into five things that actually matter. Corporations call it market intelligence and assign full-time people to it. For a small business, the challenge isn’t access (it’s public) but the cost of processing it every week.
Why it matters for a small business
In any competitive market, your customer compares in seconds. If the business one block over — or one search result away — launches a cut-price offer and you find out a month later from a dip in sales, you’ve already lost a month. Competitive intelligence turns those surprises into alerts: you know on Monday they moved the price, and you calmly decide whether to respond, ignore, or do something different. What isn’t measured isn’t seen. What isn’t seen surprises you.
What you should be watching
1. Prices. Who raised, who cut, on which product. 2. Offering. Launches, removals, menu or plan changes. 3. Reviews. Trend (up/down) and any public review gaining traction — good or bad. 4. Promotions. Happy hours, 2-for-1, channel discounts (Rappi, PedidosYa, in-house). 5. Hiring. If they’re hiring, and for what role: it’s the best early signal of expansion or trouble. These five, watched weekly across 3 to 8 real competitors, are 90% of the value.
Doing it by hand vs. automating it
You can do it yourself: every Monday, open the Google, Instagram, delivery menus and job postings of five competitors and note what changed. That’s 3 to 5 hours of someone who has better things to do — and the real problem isn’t week one, it’s sustaining it every week of the year. The alternative is to automate the collection and receive only the actionable summary. That’s where Sereno comes in.
Sereno: your competitive intelligence, every Monday 8 a.m.
Sereno monitors 3 to 8 competitors you choose and, every Monday at 8 a.m., sends a 90-second WhatsApp brief with the five signals above — prices, menu, reviews, promos, hiring. It’s the intelligence a chain has, within reach of an independent business, for $110 a month. Its mirror, Espejo, looks at you the way any customer sees you. For an open sample, Espejo de tu vecindario publishes per-micro-zone reports for Lima, free.