001 · Product Case Study

UX Rival —
Beyond the Screenshot

Building an AI-powered competitive intelligence tool that moved past showing what competitors built, to revealing the gaps they left open.

Product Lead & Builder
Next.js · Gemini API
2024 — 2025
uxrival.xyz

01 · The Problem

Every designer does
competitive research.
No tool honored it.

Whether documented or not, one of the first things a designer does when working on a feature is look at how competitors have handled the same problem. They open Mobbin, scroll Behance, take screenshots from app stores. It is practically universal.

But every existing tool answers only one question: what has been done? They show the artifact. They catalogue the surface. What they do not do is tell you what the gap between those artifacts means, or what a product could do differently if it paid attention to that gap.

"The insight was not that designers needed more screenshots. It was that they needed someone to tell them what the screenshots meant, and what was still unclaimed."

UX Rival was built to answer a different question: not what has been done, but what has not been done yet, and what that gap means for the product you are building right now.

02 · Build Approach

Product Lead.
Designer. Builder.
All three at once.

This was a solo build. I handled product strategy, feature decisions, go-to-market thinking, and the actual shipping. There was no design file. No Figma. No handoff to a developer. UX Rival was shipped through what I now call intentional vibe-coding: moving fast with clear product thinking, without traditional design artifacts.

That approach was both a constraint and a revelation. Every decision had to be about the product, not the process. And it confirmed something that became one of the biggest learnings of the entire build: with the tools available today, building is no longer the hard part.

Next.js Gemini API Resend Vercel Windsurf No design file

Product · Landing Page & Input Interface

UX Rival landing page showing competitor analysis input interface with industry selector, competitor fields and report depth options

The entry interface. Competitor Analysis, My Product vs Market, and PM Intelligence modes — all accessible from one view.

03 · The User

Built for designers.
Adopted by PMs.

The original assumption was clear: product designers do competitive UX research most frequently and would immediately recognize the value of a tool that went beyond screenshots to actual analysis. That assumption held.

What was not anticipated was that product managers would engage with it just as strongly, often using the output to frame roadmap conversations and product decisions in team settings. No deliberate repositioning happened. The user expanded on its own.

This revealed something important about the product's true positioning: the value was not in the design workflow specifically, but in the decision-making workflow. That distinction matters for how UX Rival grows from here.

04 · Key Product Decisions

Three decisions that
shaped what UX Rival
actually became.

The first version showed competitive analysis. These are the decisions that made it something more.

Decision 01

Add Recommendations

Early on it became clear that users left with information but not direction. Analysis without a next step is just observation. A recommendations layer was added: after the competitive analysis, UX Rival suggests what a product could do differently or better based on what the comparison revealed.

This shifted the product from a research tool to a decision support tool. That is a meaningfully different value proposition, and the one users consistently responded to most.

Decision 02

Surface the Competitors You Were Not Watching

Most designers analyze the obvious players. The ones they already know. The risk is confirmation bias: you compare against what you expect to find, and miss the edges of the market.

UX Rival introduces competitors the user had not included in their original query. This added serendipity and depth in a way that no comparable tool does, and regularly became the feature users mentioned as the one that surprised them most.

Decision 03

Anchor the Analysis in Data

Qualitative observations are useful. Quantitative context makes them credible and actionable in a business setting.

Adding data to the output meant users could walk into a product meeting with something beyond "I noticed that Competitor X does this differently." It gave the analysis weight in rooms where design intuition alone does not always land.

Product · Analysis Output View

UX Rival analysis results showing side-by-side competitor scores, dimension breakdowns with Good/Average/Poor ratings, key insights and actionable recommendations

The output that users responded to most: scored dimensions, key insights, and a "Your Move" column with concrete, actionable recommendations.

05 · What Did Not Work

The API feature
and what it revealed
about distribution.

The API feature was built with a clear hypothesis: teams and developers would want to integrate UX Rival's analysis into their existing workflows. Pipeline it. Automate it.

That adoption has not happened at the level expected.

What I assumed

Developers and product teams would discover the API and integrate UX Rival into their workflows naturally, driven by the utility of automated competitive analysis.

What actually happened

The people who discovered UX Rival came through design communities and content. They were not the same audience who would reach for an API. Two different user types. One distribution channel.

Looking back, this is more likely a marketing and positioning problem than a feature problem. The feature works. The audience that would use it has not been reached yet. A product can be right and still not find the right person if distribution is not intentional.

06 · Outcomes

Real usage.
Honest numbers.

10+
Users with meaningful feedback
2
Distinct user types discovered
3
Analysis modes shipped

The feedback from users has consistently confirmed the core value: the analysis is useful, the recommendations are actionable, and the surfacing of unknown competitors is the standout feature. The honest limitation is that most usage has been one-off rather than habitual.

"Ten users who each used it once and found it genuinely useful is not a failure. It is a signal that the product delivers value but has not yet found its reason to be opened again."

That pattern — impressive on first use, low return rate — is the defining challenge. It places UX Rival in the nice-to-have category rather than the essential category. Not a flaw in the product. The most important question the product has to answer next.

07 · What This Built in Me

Three things UX Rival
taught that no course
could have.

01

Building has been democratized. Marketing has not.

With AI-assisted development and modern APIs, the barrier to shipping a functional product has dropped dramatically for anyone with clear product thinking. What has not been democratized is distribution. Getting a product in front of the right person, at the right moment, is still the hard part and the next skill frontier.

02

The difference between nice-to-have and essential is everything.

A product can delight users and still not become part of their workflow. The gap between those two outcomes is not quality — it is frequency of need. Designing for a use case that arises weekly behaves very differently from one that arises monthly. UX Rival lives in the monthly category, and that shapes every growth decision from here.

03

Your user expands when your value proposition is real.

PMs were never in the brief. They showed up because the product delivered something genuinely useful to people making decisions, not just people doing design. When a product's value is real, users self-select in ways you did not plan for. That is a signal worth following.