Watch your customers. Not your competitors.
There's a particular comfort in watching what your rivals are doing. It feels like work. You read their changelog, study their pricing page, screenshot their new feature and wonder if you should have one too. A whole afternoon can go by like this, and at the end of it you've learned almost nothing you can use.
One support conversation will tell you more.
A customer who took the time to email you is a customer telling you exactly where the friction is. What confused them. What they expected and didn't get. What they nearly gave up on. That's not a guess about the market – that's the market, in your inbox, being unusually honest with you.
Competitors will tell you what they think customers want. Customers will tell you what they actually want, and the two are rarely the same.
I read the support emails myself for a reason. The moment you delegate that, you lose the one direct line you have to the truth about your own product.
Your rivals are guessing too. Your customers aren't.
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