🧭 Japanese Trains, Roadmap Spy and AI search hacks (Founder's Compass)
Hello there and welcome to Founder's Compass, a good way to get oriented around the labyrinthian world of startups.
Tool of the week: Get your brand discovered in AI Search
Superlines helps your brand show up in all AI searches. Effortlessly enhance your visibility across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
Video of the week: Japanese Railroads
This video is a dedication to one of our startups from the most recent ReaktorX Batch (raildart). A quick dive into how the Japanese make their railway system run like a swiss clock:
Top 5 stories of the week
“In this article I’ll be looking at how UI/UX and Product Designers can create better AI-enabled Products, the design strategies to consider when building intelligent interfaces, and how design-in-tech might prepare us for the future of this technology.”
“Stakeholders can be particularly adverse. Not all of them, and not all of the time. But it constantly surprises me how often I’m told we need ‘revamp’ or ‘refresh’ a website or its content and there’s no thought of doing research; the expectation is you leap straight into designing.”
“In my 20s, I never took any formal presentation training and learned on the job. It wasn’t until my 30s that I started learning presentation skills. Two close colleagues—William Lidstone and Sam Kelly—at an international agency where I worked initiated and authored training material.
Their premise was a simple 3-step process: planning, writing, and delivering.”
“Several years ago, I inherited a media attitudes study. It was a standard type of questionnaire run among the general population to understand their attitudes toward the upcoming weekend’s movie releases. The study was on behalf of a media organization to allocate advertising spend to meet its target audiences.
That, at least, was the theory. But in practice, it just plain didn’t work. That was why I had “inherited” the study. As it stood, the predictive power of the attempt was almost zero — the company might as well have flipped a coin with their spend and the study added nothing to their insight.”
Updates from Creative Motion & ReaktorX:
We’re hosting Vibe Coding workshops all over the city of Bucharest in 4 different educational institutions. Check our pages to register ;)
Startup idea of the week: Roadmap Spy
Problem:
Companies are constantly looking for an edge over their competitors, sometimes resorting to extreme (even illegal) measures to gather intelligence. However, competitors leave behind digital breadcrumbs—hidden signals across websites, job postings, and code repositories—that can reveal strategic moves. The problem? No existing tool effectively consolidates and analyzes these scattered clues into actionable insights.
Solution:
A SaaS platform that automatically tracks and analyzes competitors’ digital footprints, surfacing roadmap insights legally and in real-time.
How It Works:
1️⃣ Select Competitors – Users enter competitors they want to track.
2️⃣ Multi-Source Crawling – Our engine continuously scans:
Websites & Subdomains: Changelogs, sitemaps, meta tags, robots.txt.
GitHub Intelligence: Repos, branches, commit messages, forks, and package updates.
Job Listings: Key roles, departments, and tech stacks hinting at future product development.
3️⃣ Automated Insights – AI consolidates data into a real-time dashboard, highlighting roadmap signals and trends.
Benefits:
✔️ Stay Ahead – Predict competitor moves before they happen.
✔️ Multi-Source Tracking – Comprehensive monitoring across web, GitHub, and hiring trends.
✔️ Legal & Ethical – No espionage, just publicly available intelligence.
✔️ Automated Reports – Saves time by removing manual tracking.
Go-to-market:
🎯 Target Market: Mid-market & enterprise SaaS companies in competitive industries (e.g., HR software, fintech).
🎯 Business Model: Monthly subscription based on the number of competitors tracked.
🎯 Acquisition Strategy: Target businesses already investing in competitive intelligence tools like Crayon & Klue.
Challenges:
⚠️ Data Accuracy & Noise – Ensuring relevant insights without overwhelming users.
⚠️ Technical Complexity – Requires robust web crawling & AI-powered analytics.
⚠️ Market Differentiation – Competing against established intelligence platforms.
Stick close for the next one.