A defensible competitive dossier begins with one buyer decision and keeps every observation tied to a dated source, compared configuration, evidence label, contradiction state, and review date.
Begin with the decision and its criteria
State the decision the research must inform, such as changing a package, revising a positioning claim, prioritizing a capability, or answering a recurring buyer question. Translate that decision into criteria before opening competitor pages. Each criterion should identify the relevant buyer job, acceptable evidence, comparison unit, and consequence if the result changes.
Limit the competitor set to the products that can affect the current decision. Add adjacent substitutes only when buyers genuinely compare them. Record the product edition, geography, billing period, user count, usage assumptions, and observed date for every price or capability. A matrix without configurations often compares entry-level access from one provider with enterprise access from another.
Capture evidence that can be revisited
Prefer current provider documentation, pricing pages, contracts supplied by the buyer, public filings, release notes, and reproducible product behavior. Save the page title, URL, access date, relevant passage or screenshot, and the exact claim it supports. The SEC's EDGAR search is one example of a primary-source archive for public-company disclosures when those filings bear on the decision.
Web pages change after the research is delivered. The Wayback Machine can preserve public page versions, although coverage and capture quality vary. Keep a local source receipt permitted by the source terms, and record when a capture could not be archived. Every row should state whether it reflects provider language, direct observation, customer reporting, or an inference.
Write bounded conclusions and review dates
A conclusion should answer the defined criterion and retain its qualifiers. State which configurations were compared, what was observed, where evidence conflicts, and what remains unknown. A missing public price supports the statement that no public price was found during the search; it does not establish that the product costs more or less than a competitor.
Assign a staleness date based on how quickly the source can change. Pricing and packaging may need review before every commercial use, while an architectural limitation observed in a pinned version may remain stable longer. Reality Contact, LLC prepares the evidence object. The buyer approves strategy, external claims, and any action taken from it.
Where the service stops
Reality Contact, LLC prepares source-linked competitive research, but the buyer owns trial rights, internal evidence, product and pricing strategy, publication decisions, legal review, and every commercial action taken from the dossier. The buyer approves the factual comparison and uses the dated evidence to update the product, pricing, positioning, or roadmap decision it was commissioned to inform. This is dated factual research and document preparation, and it does not replace legal, financial, investment, procurement, or professional advice. The buyer controls trial rights, confidential sources, decision criteria, strategy, publication, legal review, and every commercial action.
Sources: SEC EDGAR full-text search; Internet Archive Wayback Machine.