Andrew Holt (top) and Kris Rasmussen (bottom) are the founders of Competitious. Andrew holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and was previously a product manager at Yahoo Shopping. Kris graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science with a technical minor in Mathematics from UCLA, and previously was an engineer at Microsoft. Visit the company blog here.

What is Competitious and how did it get started?

Competitious is an online tool that helps companies track their competition by giving them the ability to collaboratively discover, organize, and share their competitive intelligence. Competitious was born as an internal tool that we built to help keep track of our competition for another project. We had previously tried using a combination of social bookmarking, Excel spreadsheets, text documents, and various other sources of information to manage our research but quickly became frustrated by the lack of organization, security, and efficiency that these disparate services provided. After we finished building some basic functionality for the internal tool, we realized there was a need in the market for a service that everyone in a company, either an early-stage startup or established business, could use to stay updated on the competition.

We launched Competitious with a basic set of core features, targeted mainly on gathering competitive information. We are focused right now on improving that functionality, making it easier to discover and share the wealth of information available about a company’s competitors. We are in the process of building powerful tools to automatically collect, analyze, and filter news and other sources of competitive intelligence.

What are the different hardware and software technologies you use, and why did you choose them?

Competitious is currently written on top of Ruby on Rails. We chose Ruby on Rails because we enjoy Ruby’s syntax and powerful language features as well as the rapid development environment that Rails promotes. Most of our data processing work is now being developed in Java for the raw speed needed to parse and analyze the vast amount of data that we are going to crawl. Our production servers are running multiple Mongrel processes that are load balanced with Apache, enabling us to easily scale the front end very needed. We use MySQL for storing standard project data as well as flat files for some of the caching that we do. All of this is running on Linux servers with Intel dual-core processors with a few gigs of ram. Releases are deployed across our servers via Capistrano and Subversion.
 
What is your business model?

Competitious launched as an entirely free web service. We will be developing premium services on top of Competitious, but we plan to continue to improve the free version as well. Initially, our goal is to approach markets that were not traditionally targeted by existing tools, offering an affordable package that makes competitive analysis simpler and more powerful to anyone involved in a project, from the founder of startup to a sales professional at a large company. As our services grow, we have plans to be disruptive in the enterprise market as well.