How is BriefDesk different from a website change tracker?

A change tracker tells you a page changed. BriefDesk tells you what the change means, in a few paragraphs a person would write, and ignores the changes that don't matter.

Which industries is BriefDesk for?

Businesses whose competitors publish a list that changes, such as car dealers, estate agents, galleries, collectables dealers, online retailers and recruiters.

Can I use BriefDesk yet?

Not yet. We're looking for a small group of early clients in one industry to shape the first version. Email us if that sounds like you.

BriefDesk: Competitor briefings

The problem

Most businesses keep an eye on competitors by visiting their websites every now and then. It’s slow and patchy, and it misses the interesting part: not what a competitor offers today, but what changed since last week.

What it does

Every week BriefDesk reads the parts of your competitors’ websites that actually move: what they have in stock, what they’re asking for it, what’s sold, what’s new and who they’re hiring. It keeps a record of each visit, works out what changed, throws away the noise and writes you a briefing.

The briefing lands on Monday morning and reads like something a sharp colleague wrote. For example: a competitor listed more stock than usual, cut prices on the items that had been sitting longest, and quietly added a new finance offer on Thursday.

How it’s built

BriefDesk is built on the same collect, clean, analyse and publish pipeline that runs ArtCarli, pointed at different sources. That pipeline has spent most of a year dealing with real, messy websites, which is the hard part.

Where it’s at

In development. We’d like to build the first version alongside a handful of businesses in one industry. If you’d read this every Monday, tell us what you’d want in it.