How much attention should you actually pay to competitors?

Two failure modes I see constantly:

The first is ignoring them entirely. "We don't have competitors" or "we're not worried about them." You launch, find out three players own the space, and you're positioning against ghosts.

The second is checking their Twitter and homepage every few days and thinking that's research. You know their rebrand. You don't know what their customers actually hate about them.

The useful version is somewhere in the middle. You want to know: what do they charge, who their unhappy customers are, and which channels they're not on. That's it. That tells you where to position, who to talk to first, and where there's room.

I built ScoutBrief to make that specific part fast. Describe your business, it pulls real competitors, maps pricing and positioning, shows where they fall short. Takes 30 seconds. First report is free.

What's your relationship with competitor research? Ignore it, obsess over it, or something in between?