FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.
How do you sign up for a competitor's product without getting blocked for having a work email?
AI CTO uses a sandboxed workspace with a generic email (yourcompany-research@forwarded-alias.com) and a burner phone number for SMS verification. For products with strict IP/domain checking, it uses a different cloud account with a residential IP proxy. Output is the onboarding flow exactly as a new user would see it, without tipping off the competitor's sales team that you're sniffing around. For products that truly gatekeep (enterprise-only demo, calendar booking with sales), the teardown notes the gatekeeping itself as a signal — high-touch sales usually means low self-serve conversion.
What about competitors who are stealth or pre-launch with almost no public info?
These need a different approach. AI CMO pulls: domain registration date + registrar (whois), LinkedIn employees claiming the company, GitHub public activity if technical, Crunchbase stealth listings, funding signals from VC portfolio announcements, founding team's Twitter/podcast presence, job postings (what roles = what product priorities). You won't get product detail, but you get enough to estimate funding, team skill, and approximate launch window. Most stealth competitors turn out to be 9+ months from a real product.
Can it do ongoing competitive monitoring, not just one-off teardowns?
Yes — that's the /workflows/competitor-monitoring workflow (related). Teardown is the deep one-time setup per competitor; monitoring is the ongoing diff. Once a competitor is in your watch list, AI CMO checks weekly for: new features (product changelog, blog posts), pricing changes, new funding announcements, key hires, major customer wins/losses. You get a weekly digest: 'Competitor A shipped 2 features, raised $15M, hired a new CRO. Competitor B is silent for 6 weeks, may be struggling.'
What about international competitors — different language, different market?
AI CMO handles multi-language: translates their homepage/docs, reads localized review sites (Capterra DE, G2 JP equivalents), identifies their regional marketing investments. Context shifts too — a competitor dominant in Japan might be invisible in the US, so the recommendation accounts for regional overlap with your customer base. For expanding internationally, this is essential input: you'll find 3-5 regional incumbents you didn't know existed in every major market.
My category is crowded — 30+ competitors. Do I need to tear down each one?
No. AI CMO recommends a 3-tier approach: direct competitors (5-8 companies, full teardown each quarter), adjacent players (10-15, monitoring-only), long tail (everyone else, flagged when they raise funding or hit a traction milestone). For the direct tier, teardowns compound — after the first one (which takes 24 hours), subsequent ones go faster because the framework + sources are the same, and you're just filling in different data.