AI vs. Noise: How to Track Competitors Without the Burnout

0:00Welcome to the Canadian SME Small Business Podcast, a podcast for Canadian Small Businesses. We interview Canadian experts and entrepreneurs to provide expert insight into marketing, innovation, business leadership, technology, and trends that impact small businesses. Whether you're just getting started or already established, UPS is here to help you make the most of your time. Their services, tools, expertise, and team of UPS Small Business Ambassadors can help businesses with all sizes, simplify processes, improve customer experience, and guide you on the path to growth. My name's Elaine Tank-Komo, founder of Easy Dazies, the official schedule for kids, and I want to invite you to visit UPS.com to learn more and save up to 52% or more on shipping. This is a paid advertisement. Hi everyone, this is Mahin and welcome to the Canadian SME Small Business Podcast. Today we're exploring how data-driven intelligence and website monitoring can provide

1:01a massive competitive advantage, because in the digital world that changes by the second, staying head means knowing exactly where your competitors move, when regulations shift or when prices drop before anyone else does. Joining us to discuss this is Eric Ducuto, the head of marketing at VisualPink, Eric leads growth in competitive intelligence for the world's leading website change detection platform, trusted by over 2 million users and 85% of the fortune by 100, with over a decade of experience across finance, education, and tech. Eric is an expert in building marketing systems at that scale. So in this episode we'll discuss lots including the journey of scaling B2B SaaS, giant, the practical power of competitive intelligence spreads, that means in the launch of VisualPink's new AI probably sweet. So without our further ado, let's dive in. Eric, we're very pleased to have you on the show today. Welcome to the podcast. How are you? Thank you Mahin. It's a pleasure to be here. Doing well. Nice snowy Toronto this afternoon. Really it is and very pleased to have you with us this afternoon as well, Eric.

2:05On Eric, VisualPink has seen an incredible journey from a bootstrap startup to a platform used by millions of people and the majority of the fortune 500. This says what strategies help to VisualPink scale to over 2 million global users? Yeah, it's funny. If you've been in marketing for the last few years, you might have heard of product-led growth as a sort of a popular new trend or popular new strategy. I like to think that VisualPink was kind of doing it before it was in a sense where it's a freemium model that really makes the core value proposition very obvious to anyone who goes to the VisualPink homepage and that's put in a URL, put in a web page, and we'll notify you when something changes. We're replacing that refresh button, a very simple, very specific pain point that again, we put the freemium model forward allowing you to enter the ecosystem, allowing you to understand what we do, and then obviously we have some plans for our users as they go and as they grow in their usage

3:08of VisualPink. But really, the ability to scale and drive adoption of VisualPink starts at the very simple sort of freemium-led product-led growth level. That is a great starting point, and it's a remarkable growth story as well, Eric. And highlights that testing often and scaling what works as the true engine of a successful SaaS operation. Now let's look at how that platform actually provides value to the businesses that are using it today. Many small business owners, Eric, they feel that they don't have the time to track every move their competitors make, but you suggest a more systemic, systematic approach actually. Please tell us how can SME's monitor competitors effectively without feeling overwhelmed? Yeah, I think this sort of blends a little bit with the first question you pose forward. And I think for us, we have a very horizontal tool in a sense that there's a million different use cases for folks. Competitive intelligence,

4:10competitive monitoring is one of those. And again, I would say for anyone in the SaaS business, or in this sort of startup SaaS world, spelling out the use cases for your customers is super important. In the sense that oftentimes I'll meet startup founders who say, you know, our use case is sort of self-evident. People, when they see what we do, they'll fill in the blanks, they'll come up with their own use cases. My experience has been the opposite, where oftentimes, if you allow your users or your investors even to have to do the work of filling in the gaps, it sometimes doesn't always land with them. So to specifically address your question, we've put in a lot of effort into educating visitors and users into how to use visual pings specifically for competitive pricing or competitive monitoring. And one of the main things I've always heard from folks when you go through these discussions is, I don't know, like we monitor our competitors from time to time, but I don't have time to do it, or I start using tools like

5:16visual pings or some of the other alternatives in the market. And I get all these pings, no pun intended. And I just don't know what to do with it. So the thing that I always recommend is to start small. And so there are loads of free or premium tools. Google alerts is great. So pick your top two or three competitors. And I mean, you know, you're literally the two or three competitors that are named by your prospects and all your sales calls or all your conversations. Set up a Google alerts for them. And just sort of whether it's once a day or once a week even, just sort of see the types of alerts that you get and types of mentions that you get. Another great way to do that is actually using a new tool called alert mouse that offers a sort of a premium style tool. And it's a similar idea where it picks up mentions online of specific brands. So again, pick two or three competitors. Set up your Google alerts. Set up your alert mouse alerts. And see what they're doing. It'll give you a sense of what people are saying online on social about them. Google alerts does a great job picking up sort of PR announcements or any sort of,

6:20you know, greater strategic moves that they might be making that they're announcing and showcasing, you know, new integrations, new hires and specific fields, new products, etc. And then use visual pain as well. Once you sort of graduate, ask the first two. Use visual pain, track more specific cases. And usually the number one I start with is pricing. So track your competitors pricing page. And this works a little bit better depending on your niche. If you're in SaaS or if you're in e-commerce, you know, track similar skews or if you're in SaaS, of course, track their their pricing plans and their pricing tiers. And it's surprising how much changes. And how often some of these companies are making moves, even if it's not so easily apparent when you're in the weeds in your own business. And so if you can just start there, just start with pricing. It'll help you give a sense of what are their customers and their prospects saying about their pricing. How are they maybe thinking internally or what sort of signals are they giving off in terms of

7:21how internally they're digesting their pricing in the market. And if anything, it's just the barometer of, hey, you know, our competitors all raised prices across the board. It could be obviously a single, then a number of things, but it might be a single to you that maybe you have slack in the market to raise your prices too. Now, from there, there's, you know, there's no shortage of different types of recommendations I would have for monitoring your competitors for specific signals. Is just that, again, my experience is it's so easy to go overwhelmed where eventually, you know, you just say, hey, like, I don't have time for this. I'm not going to do this or I'm getting all these pings and I don't know what to do with them. Or oftentimes the other sort of side of that coin is just, I'm so busy with my own business. I don't know where to start. I'm not going to do any of that stuff. That is an essential tool kit for growth. Eric, it improves that automated monitoring turns manual noise into actionable data driven decisions.

8:22Now, let's discuss how your team uses these very tools to stay ahead of the game internally. Because it's often said that the best way to understand a product is to see how the creators use it themselves to stay competitive. Eric tells us, how does the visual painting use the product for internal research and insights? Yeah, I could talk about this for hours. Like I sort of alluded to in the previous question, there's no shortage of signals that are publicly shared that your competitors are giving to you every day. And sometimes those are first party, meaning it's coming from their website, but also sometimes it's third party stuff. So one of the key things we really keep an eye on is review sites. So some of the popular ones are G2 reviews, captera, trust pilot. There's no shortage of other review sites depending in your space. But we keep a really close eye on the reviews of competitors one because it tells us what's frustrating some of our competitors customers and our competitors users. And that's a signal for the product team in terms of where we want to bring our roadmap or what sort of tweaks and

9:26optimizations we can make to our tool, as well as things like industry publications or blogs or forums even. And sort of that's social listening on places like Reddit or some super niche blogs and forums. Again, that's where people who are hopefully real people, real users, are giving you sort of their no bias unfiltered opinions of your competitors and also yourself. So that's just one one section. And that one's a little bit more actionable for us because reviews are sort of coming in fairly consistently. And people are always talking about these sorts of tools, particularly on forums like Reddit, where we can see how are people using this? What are they trying to do? And what sorts of problems are they having? And funny enough, one of the things that I see sometimes is people complaining about things that we've actually solved for. And

10:27someone might say, hey, I'm struggling with getting too many alerts or something like that. When perhaps our product team nine months ago released a new feature that sort of addresses that tool. That's another signal entirely. That's sort of I think for the customer marketing side of us. That's where we say, okay, maybe we need to do a little bit more work around education. And so, you know, I've talked about just just review sites and just public forums. And there's no shortage of work that that just monitoring those things gives to our marketing team. I won't even get started on some of the other stuff like monitoring for promotions, monitoring, their some of their executive changes, monitoring sort of bits and pieces of changes of copy on different pages of the websites, like if signals around sort of positioning changes and things like that. Again, it all sort of comes together and it does require some effort. But again, the automated sort of scaling of it allows us to really have a really wide reach in terms of

11:30eyes and ears online. Well, that is a great example of eating your own dog food and it emphasizes that real-time alerts are the key to maintaining a leadership position in any industry. Now, building on that internal use, let's talk about the massive shift AI is bringing to your platform. VisualPing recently launched a major AI power suite in November of 2025, introducing features like custom data extraction and visual analysis models. Please tell us how has AI improved website monitoring to service only meaningful changes. Yeah, there's a lot of stories that we see internally across different market segments. And so at a very basic level, the way that tools like VisualPing worked in the past was you monitored or page with some filters and some restraints and you get an update anytime, anything changed. Then as a user, it was up to you to sort of take that alert, read what the alert was,

12:32compare the before and after screenshots, visit the website, sort of do a bit of digging and see, okay, is this alert meaningful to me or not? And from time to time, you know, things like banner changes, timestamp changes, ads rotating like on a carousel or cookie banners would trigger alerts. And that was one of the main frustrations people had with tools like VisualPing and and our competitors. And so the emergence of AI really allowed us at scale to roll out this website monitoring with AI alerts and summaries. And so the way that it works today is when you go to a tool like VisualPing and you want to track a specific page, you can use natural language to tell VisualPing what it is you're looking for. And so that allows VisualPing to ignore the, I guess, unimportant alerts, unimportant, you know, in the sense that they may not be critical or what you are looking for, but it might be the case for someone else to ignore those reports, ignore those alerts and only give you the ones that you want. So a prime example is, you know,

13:36I was doing some Christmas shopping for my wife and I was looking at a certain piece of jewelry. And I was, you know, really excited about this. And I went on VisualPing. I said, let me know when this piece of jewelry goes down below X dollars. And they had, they had like a Black Friday sale. You know, I was able to shop a little bit earlier. I wasn't waiting until the last minute. You know, I recommend that as well for any of your partners doing your Christmas shopping, but I was able to get alert when a Black Friday discount came through and then pick up that particular item. So specifically what I went to VisualPing was alert me when the price drops below X dollars. And so as they were updating the website and, you know, they were changing ads and whatever things like that, I wasn't getting alerts. I was only getting that alert in my email inbox when that specific change happened. And you can extrapolate this to a wide variety of categories. You know, just the example we were talking about, all of our competitor monitoring jobs,

14:37they're all given a prompt using natural language that, you know, frankly, I've refined a bit, but it's basically natural language that says, you know, precision yourself as a competitor or a competitive pricing analyst or competitor analyst. And then only update me when critical changes occur to pricing, product, executive leadership, you know, any specific insightful reviews. And each one of my prompts personally and for the prompts of millions of users is now being sort of contextualized with natural language using AI so that we're getting rid of those alerts that really were just sometimes an image changing or a date going from 2025 to 2026, for example, and all being about things that you care about. And I would say, you know, that's all fine and dandy, but really from what I've seen and the people that I've talked to is it's built a lot of trust for the tool. Whereas in the past, you know, people might get frustrated

15:37and say, oh, I'm getting too many alerts, I'm just going to turn that off. But now when you're only getting imports that kind of matter to you, it builds trust with the tool and it makes you want to use it more. And inevitably, the more you want to use it, the more sticky it becomes in your day-to-day life. And hopefully, in your use as a visual pen user. That is a massive leap to where forward towards productivity and arrogant confirms that AI driven filtering is a solution to the information overload facing modern businesses. Finally, let's look at the accolades and the future vision for the company. The visual pen has been cleaning up in the awards category lately ranking as one of one of the best Canadian solver companies in earning multiple number one spots on G2. Please tell us Eric, what do the G2 rankings signal for visual pens growth and 2026 tools? Yeah, I think the straightforward answer is, you know, the G2 ranking signal that people who actually

16:38use visual pens like visual pens, and they're willing to share that. But actually, I think more importantly, from a marketing point of view, and this is, I think, important for all entrepreneurs is these third-party rankings I've seen help citations for us and for our appearance in LLMs and AI models. When people are asking about, hey, what's the best tool to use for website monitoring? VisualPing gets mentioned more and more often because we have accolades and reviews like this. So, you know, what I would say is, if you're not getting reviews, do look for opportunities to get reviews, real reviews from your users. And when you do get these types of reviews and these sort of accolades, do try and celebrate them. You know, maybe try and do a PR release or were to have you. But anyways, I digress. Ultimately, what this means for visual ping and what we're looking for moving forward in 2026 is moving away not from website monitoring as just an alert tool of a single change on a single web page, but how to move website monitoring

17:45into a greater field of intelligence. We are really an intelligence company. We offer website intelligence based on changes than updates that are occurring. And so I can, I can sort of unveil the kimono a bit and say that a lot of our product building moving forward is around sort of aggregating and summarizing that intelligence across different niches and topics and delivering that better to our customers. So, you know, if you're, Mahin, if you're monitoring, you know, let's say a competitor business, again, just to lean on the competitor monitoring topic, you might get a whole suite of alerts and important alerts on a week. But what if you could just get a daily brief at the end of the day that gives you really the high level overview and maybe suggests some follow-up ideas. You know, what if you could get at the end of the week a industry-wide sort of summary of all the things that happened in your industry or all the things your competitors were doing. That to me is like the next step in the elevation of website monitoring, which turns

18:50into more intelligence, or let's call it website monitoring intelligence. And that's really where we're trying to go. We're trying to make visual playing not just a place for checks and alerts, but a place where you essentially get the most up-to-date brief summaries and intelligence from the things that matter to you across the web. That is such an inspiring roadmap, Eric. And it proves that clinical excellence in content management and software design keeps you at the top of the global pile. As you wrap up now, if there's one key growth lesson, SME's should remember, from VisualPings journey, what would it be? Yeah, this isn't just for visual playing. This is across all the roles I've ever had in Canadian marketing teams. And I've always been on smaller teams. And my personal experience, my personal sort of takeaway for anyone listening is just to always be testing. People in sales famously say always be closing. I think in marketing and in growth, it's always be testing. And that means trying different tactics cheaply as inexpensively

19:55as you can, and then seeing where you get a hit. And then when you get one hit, take time, try in that again, and then see if it works again. And then what you'll see typically in different industries or in different market segments for niches is you'll find something eventually that works once, and then it works twice, and then it works four times, and then eight times. And then, you know, considering most teams only have so many hours in the day and so many resources, that gives you a signal of where to go and where to try. But ultimately, your job is to always be testing. Always keep drilling, keep experimenting. Just because something works for a plumber, you know, maybe Google ads works for a plumbing agency doesn't mean it's going to work for your transportation and trucking enterprise software. You know, so try different tactics, try different strategies. Don't fall in love or don't assume that any given tactic is a silver bullet for you, just because it may or may not be for someone else. And then from there, you'll get the

20:55signals that you need to actually find the ways that or the tactics, rather, that move the needle for you. And I just say like so many teams, it's easy to sort of, you know, find a three or four things that kind of work for you, and then kind of just keep doing that over and over until eventually, it stops working, or maybe it plateaus, and then you're scrambling. You're like, oh, like I, we need, you know, we have growth expectations in the next year. We need to figure out what can we do next? Like, and then you're starting from scratch. You're, you know, you're retro, you're retroactively, you're reacting to a need in leads or traffic or sales versus if you're always constantly testing, if you make time for that, you'll find that, you know, you're oftentimes with so many ideas and so many things you can do that you have confidence in that will move the needle versus that, that sort of prior example where you're reacting and you're kind of doing your thing and, you know, you figure, hey, you know, about emails and podcasts and blogs are working well for

21:57us. Let's just keep doing more of that in 2026. Well, oftentimes it works really well until it stops, or until it plateaus. So if you just fast forward to the last part of this, all I'll say is always be testing. Right. That is a powerful and a very actionable message Eric. Thank you so much for taking the time out to chat with us and sharing such great expertise in and your vision with us. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. And if anyone watching has any questions, or it's curious about anything that we talk about today, don't hesitate to reach out or find me. I'm sure you'll be able to share those details appropriately wherever or however you see that. Absolutely. Thank you Eric once again, and listeners that was an inside performance with Eric. We explore the secrets of SaaS growth, the power of automated competitive intelligence, and the future of AI driven monitoring. Thank you for tuning into the podcast. Please visit our website, Canadianism.ca for valuable resources. Before we leave a special shout out to our partners, UPS, Evangelical College, ADP,

22:58and Google for the ongoing commitment to empowering small businesses in Canada. I'll see you next time. Please keep it a meeting and strive for success. We'll see you in the next one. Thank you for listening to the Canadian SME podcast. Please visit CanadianSME.ca to subscribe and join us next again as we share more expert advice from Canadian business leaders.