Invent your worst competitor. Take its best idea.
A large, established company can be expensive to run and slow to change. Imagine a competitor free of the commitments that hold yours back, one built to exploit your weaknesses. Have AI work out how that upstart would attack.
Try it now
Copy the prompt into your AI tool of choice, then answer its questions as they come.
Paste it into any AI chat to start. For most people, this is all you need.
Everything on this page in one paste: the prompt plus the full plan, every step and what to check. Use it for longer moves, to plan ahead, to share with a colleague, or if your AI can't open links.
How it goes
What the AI will do
- Research your company, its actual competitors, and the commitments that affect its costs, speed, and freedom to experiment.
- Design a hypothetical rival that exploits the constraints you confirm, then work through a credible sequence of competitive moves.
- Recommend the rival’s most useful idea for your company to adapt, showing what adoption would require and how you could learn whether it works.
What to have ready
- Your company’s identity if it is unclear from context, plus useful internal context when accessible research leaves important gaps.
Where you come in
- Confirm or correct the company picture before the AI builds the rival.
- Review the imagined attack and recommended idea, adding constraints the AI has missed.
What you'll get
You’ll have a concrete hypothetical competitor, its competitive attack, and a recommended idea your own company could realistically explore adapting.
You're done when
You have a concrete hypothetical competitor, a credible sequence of competitive moves, and a recommended idea your own company could adapt.
These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result. ### Start with the activity and the user's context Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear. Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them. ### Check the capabilities needed for this work Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit. When useful access is missing: - Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help. - Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot. - If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response. - Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available. ### Ask focused questions and respect the answers Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful. Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements. ### Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material. Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work: - Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role. - Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations. - Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately. ### Produce, check, and revise the result Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them. Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result. Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized. Invent a formidable hypothetical competitor to my company and help me take its most useful idea. Ground the exercise in how my company actually competes. Do the research yourself and ask one focused question at a time when you need my input. ### 1. Understand my company and its real competition. Most users work in large, established companies with huge headcounts, expensive operating structures, locked-in vendor relationships, bureaucracy, and legacy systems and processes. Protecting an established brand can further limit their freedom to experiment. These commitments can make it difficult to build, test, and iterate as quickly, cheaply, and creatively as a new competitor. Use this as the starting point for the investigation. Identify my company from context; ask if you cannot. Research what it sells, whom it serves, how it makes money, its real competitors, and its sources of advantage. Use supplied and accessible internal material where relevant and public primary sources where available. Try your available research tools and materials before asking me to gather information. If essential sources remain inaccessible, explain what is missing and ask for the smallest useful input, such as an existing competitor overview or a spoken account of the business. Work from available evidence and make unresolved gaps explicit. Establish which constraints—including ones not listed above—apply to my company, and how a challenger could exploit them. Investigate how those constraints affect operating costs, speed, experimentation, and the ability to develop new products or services. Look for concrete examples and distinguish documented conditions from hypotheses. Some firms will not fit this pattern; adapt to what you find. Show me the company picture, including its advantages and the constraints you have identified, and ask me to confirm or correct it. Wait for my response and incorporate corrections before building the rival around it. ### 2. Design the competitor we would least like to face. Create a clearly hypothetical company designed to exploit the most consequential weaknesses while finding a way around our advantages. It might be a small startup with substantial funding, a lean cost structure, and the freedom to experiment and iterate rapidly. Design it to move faster, build or operate more cheaply, or create enough customer demand to charge more. Explain which incumbent commitments it avoids and how that gives it an advantage. Choose the characteristics that exploit our actual constraints, including any uncovered during the investigation. - Explain its target customers, value proposition, operating model, capabilities, funding assumptions, and why customers would choose it. - Give it a credible route to the talent, technology, distribution, trust, or other assets it needs. Funding alone does not solve every constraint. - Distinguish grounded possibilities from ambitious assumptions so I can assess the scenario. ### 3. Work through its attack. Develop the rival's strategy as a sequence of concrete moves. For each move, explain the weakness it targets, the product or offer it launches, how it reaches customers, what resources it deploys, why customers switch or pay more, and how success enables the next move. Include likely responses from our company and how the rival might adapt. Check the sequence against real competitors and practical constraints, revising moves that rely on implausible shortcuts. Present the rival and its attack in a vivid, specific account. Support factual claims about the real market with sources and keep the invented company and its actions clearly hypothetical. ### 4. Take the idea we can actually use. Identify the most useful lessons in the attack. For each promising idea, explain what makes it work, whether we could adopt or adapt it, what our existing advantages would add, and which costs, commitments, or ways of working would need to change. Recommend the strongest idea for our company rather than presenting a list without judgment. Show what adopting it could look like in concrete terms and what would let us find out whether it works. Ask what rings true or misses a constraint, and revise the scenario and recommendation with me. These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.
View full AI instructions
Invent your worst competitor. Take its best idea.
What the AI will do
- Research your company, its actual competitors, and the commitments that affect its costs, speed, and freedom to experiment.
- Design a hypothetical rival that exploits the constraints you confirm, then work through a credible sequence of competitive moves.
- Recommend the rival’s most useful idea for your company to adapt, showing what adoption would require and how you could learn whether it works.
What you can provide
- Your company’s identity if it is unclear from context, plus useful internal context when accessible research leaves important gaps.
Where you'll take part
- Confirm or correct the company picture before the AI builds the rival.
- Review the imagined attack and recommended idea, adding constraints the AI has missed.
What you'll get
You’ll have a concrete hypothetical competitor, its competitive attack, and a recommended idea your own company could realistically explore adapting.
Activity context
A large, established company can be expensive to run and slow to change. Imagine a competitor free of the commitments that hold yours back, one built to exploit your weaknesses. Have AI work out how that upstart would attack.
For the user
Paste the prompt below. The AI will research your company and its real competitors, then ask you to confirm or correct that picture before it designs a hypothetical rival.
You’ll review the rival’s attack and the recommended idea your company could borrow, adding context about what your organization could actually do.
Guidance for the AI
These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.
Start with the activity and the user's context
Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.
Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.
Check the capabilities needed for this work
Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.
When useful access is missing:
- Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
- Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
- If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
- Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.
Ask focused questions and respect the answers
Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.
Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.
Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct
Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.
Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:
- Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
- Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
- Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.
Produce, check, and revise the result
Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.
Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.
Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.
Your AI prompt
Invent a formidable hypothetical competitor to my company and help me take its most useful idea. Ground the exercise in how my company actually competes. Do the research yourself and ask one focused question at a time when you need my input.
1. Understand my company and its real competition.
Most users work in large, established companies with huge headcounts, expensive operating structures, locked-in vendor relationships, bureaucracy, and legacy systems and processes. Protecting an established brand can further limit their freedom to experiment. These commitments can make it difficult to build, test, and iterate as quickly, cheaply, and creatively as a new competitor.
Use this as the starting point for the investigation. Identify my company from context; ask if you cannot. Research what it sells, whom it serves, how it makes money, its real competitors, and its sources of advantage. Use supplied and accessible internal material where relevant and public primary sources where available. Try your available research tools and materials before asking me to gather information. If essential sources remain inaccessible, explain what is missing and ask for the smallest useful input, such as an existing competitor overview or a spoken account of the business. Work from available evidence and make unresolved gaps explicit.
Establish which constraints—including ones not listed above—apply to my company, and how a challenger could exploit them. Investigate how those constraints affect operating costs, speed, experimentation, and the ability to develop new products or services. Look for concrete examples and distinguish documented conditions from hypotheses. Some firms will not fit this pattern; adapt to what you find.
Show me the company picture, including its advantages and the constraints you have identified, and ask me to confirm or correct it. Wait for my response and incorporate corrections before building the rival around it.
2. Design the competitor we would least like to face.
Create a clearly hypothetical company designed to exploit the most consequential weaknesses while finding a way around our advantages. It might be a small startup with substantial funding, a lean cost structure, and the freedom to experiment and iterate rapidly. Design it to move faster, build or operate more cheaply, or create enough customer demand to charge more. Explain which incumbent commitments it avoids and how that gives it an advantage. Choose the characteristics that exploit our actual constraints, including any uncovered during the investigation.
-
Explain its target customers, value proposition, operating model, capabilities, funding assumptions, and why customers would choose it.
-
Give it a credible route to the talent, technology, distribution, trust, or other assets it needs. Funding alone does not solve every constraint.
-
Distinguish grounded possibilities from ambitious assumptions so I can assess the scenario.
3. Work through its attack.
Develop the rival's strategy as a sequence of concrete moves. For each move, explain the weakness it targets, the product or offer it launches, how it reaches customers, what resources it deploys, why customers switch or pay more, and how success enables the next move. Include likely responses from our company and how the rival might adapt. Check the sequence against real competitors and practical constraints, revising moves that rely on implausible shortcuts.
Present the rival and its attack in a vivid, specific account. Support factual claims about the real market with sources and keep the invented company and its actions clearly hypothetical.
4. Take the idea we can actually use.
Identify the most useful lessons in the attack. For each promising idea, explain what makes it work, whether we could adopt or adapt it, what our existing advantages would add, and which costs, commitments, or ways of working would need to change.
Recommend the strongest idea for our company rather than presenting a list without judgment. Show what adopting it could look like in concrete terms and what would let us find out whether it works.
Ask what rings true or misses a constraint, and revise the scenario and recommendation with me.
Done when
You have a concrete hypothetical competitor, a credible sequence of competitive moves, and a recommended idea your own company could adapt.
These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.
These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.