How to find real customer pain points using tools you already have
Last month, a client asked me to help identify why their competitors were gaining market share DESPITE having inferior features.
Traditional competitive analysis was no help.
Feature comparisons, pricing matrices, marketing message audits — all those surface-level insights that can miss the real story.
So we tried something different.
We collected 20 recent reviews of their main competitor and fed them into Claude with a simple prompt:
“Analyze these reviews to identify the most common complaints, feature requests, and how users really do describe this product.”
What we discovered changed the entire product roadmap.
The competitor’s customers were NOT raving about the features our client thought mattered most.
Instead, they consistently praised small convenience factors that barely appeared in marketing materials.
More importantly, the complaints revealed systematic frustrations that our client’s product could solve immediately.
But only if they knew these problems existed.
One review mentioned: “Great features, BUT I spend 10 minutes every morning just getting it set up the way I need it.”
Another: “Wish it remembered my preferences instead of resetting everything all the time.”
Fifteen similar reviews revealed a clear pattern: the competitor’s setup process was driving daily frustration, but their marketing never mentioned that.
Our client built a simple preference-saving feature in their next update.
Within three months, customer support tickets dropped 23%, and new user retention improved significantly.
This technique works because reviews reveal the gap between marketing promises and actual user experience.
In I Need That, I discuss how real customer needs often differ dramatically from stated preferences in surveys. Reviews capture authentic frustration at the moment people experience it, not retrospective opinions filtered through social desirability.
The analysis prompt should include these key elements:
- Most frequently mentioned positive aspects
- Common pain points and complaints
- Feature requests or unmet needs
- How users describe the product naturally
- Mentions of competing products and comparisons
- Changes in sentiment over time
Product Payoff: Notion discovered a major product opportunity by analyzing Slack reviews that consistently mentioned “information getting lost in chat.” Users loved Slack for communication but struggled with knowledge management.
This directly influenced Notion’s positioning as a workspace for both collaboration and documentation, helping them capture users frustrated with Slack’s limitations while avoiding direct feature competition.
Your competitive intelligence sprint: Pick your main competitor and collect 15-20 recent reviews from different platforms. Run the analysis prompt and look specifically for complaints that your product could address without major development effort.
Pay special attention to words and phrases customers use naturally — these become powerful messaging opportunities when people search for alternatives.
The biggest insights often come from problems competitors’ customers have learned to accept as “just how it is.”
What competitor do you WISH you understood better from a customer perspective?
Tap that reply arrow and share what you’ve discovered about the gap between marketing claims and user reality.
Or reach out to my team of product marketing specialists at Graphos Product.