Perplexity + Claude in Chrome: How I Built a Competitor Research Workflow in 2 Hours
The AI setup that scans 177 products across 5 platforms and surfaces what your own product is still missing.
How to really effectively run competitor research before a product launch (with PerplexityMCP and Claude in Chrome): 30 minutes to build a scored research board across 177 products and 5 platforms, then 1 hour of iterative analysis that surfaced what my own product was missing.
I had been publishing Gumroad products for months. More products meant more cover page decisions. And the same question kept coming up:
Is this actually good, or does it just feel good because I haven’t seen enough of the market?
My covers were converting. But are they working good? Compared to what? I had no baseline.
Usually if you want to know whether your cover is good, you open a few competitor pages, look around, and go with your gut.
So I did that. I opened tabs. Lots of them.
By session two, I could not remember what tab 8 looked like. I was screenshotting the covers that caught my eye last. Copying a few prices. Leaving with a vague sense of what was out there.
Then making decisions based on that.
My cover felt right because it matched the vibe I remembered. My price felt competitive because it sat somewhere in the range I still had in my head.
Every one of those decisions came from a compressed memory of the market. Not the market itself.
Someone in r/AIAssisted said it better than I could:
“My brain kept overweighting the last 20 ads I saw. I needed a way to hold the whole market in one view.”
What changed things was not more browsing.
It was seeing the whole market at once, then seeing what that changed in me. I used that same logic when testing 8 AI coding tools, for studying the Substack notes performance, and whether my app was worth building.
Hi, I’m Jenny 👋
I build AI systems and tools, then share how I did it. I run the Practical AI Builder program, for people who already use AI and want to build real things with it. Check it out if that sounds like you.
If you’re new to Build to Launch, welcome! Here’s what you might enjoy:
What’s inside:
How AI research shows you the whole market at once — the video, the board, and why tab-based research fails you every time
What Perplexity MCP + Claude does to your research process — the 4 layers of AI competitive research and why orientation is the one that matters
What 177 Gumroad products reveal about covers, pricing, and trust — the first pattern that showed up across every platform
How to spot gaps in your own product using competitor data — what the board surfaced that individual product pages never would
The exact Perplexity MCP + Claude competitive analysis workflow — the prompt, the board builder, and parallel research across 5 platforms
How to set up Perplexity MCP for an autonomous research loop that runs beside you
How to use Claude in Chrome to collect data without manually switching tabs
The exact prompt, scripts, and research board — everything to run this yourself, including the Claude Chrome workflow for cover analysis
🎁 If you want to skip rebuilding this from scratch, the exact prompt, scripts, and the same HTML research board shown in the walkthrough are included below for paid subscribers.
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