In the week of my birthday, I made Rivale.io’s website public and opened a new cohort for users to join the closed beta.
25 spots available that I’ll approve by hand. Joining the cohort gives you free and unlimited access to the SaaS. You’ll find the link with more info at the end of the post.
A burning question
Since the early days of building Rivale in public, I’ve been on a quest to find a satisfying answer to this question:
How pressing is it for WordPress plugin businesses to know what their competitors are doing?
Here’s my reasoning on where this question comes from and its role in leading my work building Rivale, including the “why” behind this new cohort.
Plugins are commercial products, hence they need paying users
Follow me in a very simplified description of market dynamics.
A WordPress commercial plugin is a product.
Products need paying users.
Paying users are what keep a plugin business going and make a profit.
First part of the equation settled. Here’s the other part.
Where do those paying and non-paying users come from?
Answer: from other businesses operating in your market, or adjacent, with products that address their needs.
What does this give us?
Those businesses are your competitors.
Every user you win is someone who looked at those competitors’ products and decided your product was meeting their needs better than the others.
How competitor monitoring affects your WordPress plugin business
Say a competitor releases a new version of their plugin with a feature you already have on your roadmap.
Knowing that they shipped it is a good reason for you to consider prioritizing it in your own roadmap or, still valuable, to discuss with your team whether that feature should ship as you had designed it.
Now, let’s say a plugin competitor gets a few negative reviews within a few weeks, all about something their plugin doesn’t seem to allow or functionality that simply breaks.
If your plugin doesn’t have that issue or, better, delivers that result more effectively, BAM, you’ve got a proven competitive advantage. Those frustrated users who left the low-star reviews are already open to looking at alternatives like your plugin.
Bottom line: what your competitors do matters to your business, in very practical ways.
How do these competitor insights translate into marketing and/or product marketing value for your WordPress plugin?
Here are a few examples, off the top of my head:
- you have an idea for a short tutorial that shows and explains how to do things using your plugin
- you can post that tutorial as clips
- you can repurpose that tutorial as text posts
- you can repurpose that tutorial as carousels and threads
- since you have the actual complaints, use cases, and/or words from your competitors’ reviews, you could use those to
- better frame (and position) how your product solves that specific use case
- add a hyper-specific FAQ to your pricing page that says things out loud
- add a new row to your full feature table
The list is raw, but you can see how it can grow into many more ideas you could dig into and further develop.
For example:
Take that tutorial, give it to your AI agent (like Claude Code) and ask it to turn it into a bullet point list of notes you can keep on the side as a reference. Then run a live webinar (gated) and have a 10-minute Q&A where attendees can submit their questions. Those questions could become additional ideas, angles, and framing for landing pages, new tutorials, and social posts.
From the live webinar recording, cut out the Q&A and add it to one of your landing pages or nurturing sequences.
Possibilities are almost endless, if you know how to scale content pipelines.
But… all these ideas and potential moves only work if you find out in a timely manner about the low-star reviews, the complaints your competitor is receiving, or their new release breaking sites.
How pressing is the need for competitive analysis for WordPress plugin businesses?
I’m sure all profitable and successful WordPress plugin businesses do competitor monitoring and analysis regularly, and plan at least some of their marketing off of that.
What I haven’t figured out yet is how often, and how deeply, WordPress plugin businesses feel they need to be up to date on what their competitors are doing.
Do WordPress plugin businesses want to hear about what their competitors have done every day, or every week?
and
Do they look at that info only a few times a year, like quarterly, when they plan a release or review the numbers?
The first cohort gave me only a partial answer, that’s why I’m opening a new one
Here’s what WordPress plugin founders and their teams shared with me in the first cohort I ran:
- One team was already tracking their WordPress.org ranking against their competitors every week, with custom scripts (some AI-powered) that keep a spreadsheet up to date.
- One user asked for competitor intelligence data both daily and weekly.
- Another user found Rivale’s summaries genuinely useful (one example was an alert on a competitor’s bug). Still, when asked, they labelled it a lower-level type of benefit.
The answer seems to depend on what a business is interested in watching, on who in the team is watching, and likely on the size of the company.
I should say some of the feedback I received came from early versions of Rivale. Nevertheless, my question stays open:
How important is it for WordPress plugin businesses to know what their competitors are doing?
I need to collect feedback from real plugin founders and developers to answer it properly.
That’s the “why” behind this new cohort.
What joining Rivale’s closed beta means
Rivale watches the plugins you compete with, on WordPress.org and on their own sites, and tells you about (among plenty of things):
- releases
- rank moves, including tag-specific ones (NEW!)
- keyword rankings (NEW!)
- pricing changes
- low-star reviews grouped by what people complain about
- page updates with summary of what changed
But that’s not all… with all the data gathered, Rivale then produces:
- Overviews, a list of key changes and moves that are worth knowing about, which you can dig deeper into or simply read as is, and
- Playbooks, marketing and/or product marketing tactics you could use to win more customers. Each Playbook starts from something that actually happened in your market and turns it into a few specific tactics you could implement straight away, tweak, or simply ignore for the moment. Think of the negative-reviews example from earlier in this post: that’s the kind of move a Playbook puts in front of you. You always see the evidence behind a suggestion and why it was generated, so you decide whether it’s worth acting on.
Among the many features, Playbooks are the one I’m probably most excited about, and the one I’m dedicating time to improve and refine almost every day. It’s still a long road to get them to where I envision them, but I truly believe they’ll become more useful the more data Rivale collects and interprets.
When you join the closed beta you get:
- Free, unlimited access to Rivale and every new feature as it ships.
- A direct line to me. I’d like to talk with everyone using Rivale, not hide behind some automations.
What I ask in return is honest feedback. What works, what doesn’t, what’s missing.
If you run a WordPress plugin business, or market one, and you want to find out what your competitors changed, what it means for your own WordPress plugin, and receive marketing and product marketing tactical ideas, request one of the 25 spots here. I read and approve every request myself. If you’d rather see what Rivale does first, the website walks through it.
For anything else, tell me in the comments or DM me on LinkedIn.