Bending Spoons
Bending Spoons is famous for building highly profitable consumer apps in apparently saturated markets. The Elytra case (their video editing suite) illustrates well how they analyse competition.
When evaluating the mobile video editing market, the obvious competitor list included iMovie, CapCut, InShot, Splice. But the framework they use internally goes further: the most important competitor is not another app — it is the status quo of user behaviour.
For most people, the status quo was: shoot a video with iPhone, post directly to Instagram Stories with some native filter. No editing app. Bending Spoons understood that the real challenge was not "convince the user to switch from CapCut to Elytra" — it was "convince the user that spending 3 extra minutes editing the video before posting is worth it".
This completely changed the acquisition strategy. Not competing on feature sets with CapCut (more functions, similar interface) — building a product where the visible result in 30 seconds was different enough from "post directly" to justify opening the app. The first screen had to "wow" before the user read a single instruction.
The most dangerous competitor is never the competing app — it is the user's existing behaviour, which requires zero effort and zero switching cost.