Tip #3 on Gathering Competitive Intelligence on Private Companies: Use Specialized Tools to Dig Deeper

Tracking the history of a company’s web site can illuminate a great deal about how the company has developed. Archive.org (the Wayback Machine) captures snapshots of web sites along an historical timeline, so you can see what a given web site looked like at a certain date. By considering a series of snapshots, you can get a sense of the development of a company’s strategy, and that trendline can even imply its future direction.

For public-sector organizations, there’s also a site called Cyber Cemetery, which captures public agency data that is considered defunct and which has been taken down.

Privco.com is an enormously valuable, cost-effective paid tool that provides company reports analogous to those on other services such as Hoover’s, but with a focus on private companies. These reports can help you answer questoins such as “What is the revenue of this private company?” that would otherwise be difficult or even impossible to answer.

This service does an excellent job of pulling data together from a combination of human intelligence sources and open source intelligence. Typical information on a company includes points such as current and historical revenue figures, employee counts, merger activity , and venture funding.

See our Previous tips on Gathering Competitive Intelligence on Private Companies:
Tip #2 on Gathering Competitive Intelligence on Private Companies: Go Local to Find the Best Data
Tip #1 on Gathering Competitive Intelligence on Private Companies: Focus on Individuals over Organizations

By Sean Campbell
By Scott Swigart