How ChangeBot 1000X Their Market Knowledge in 5 Minutes Per Day

“KeepTabz has been a wonderful safety blanket — we’re not blindsided by anything.”

Brian Sierakowski runs ChangeBot, an AI tool that reads your code changes and turns them into release notes your customers can actually understand. Like most founders, he never had room for competitor tracking — until not having it started costing him in front of his own customers. Today he keeps up in about five minutes a day.

About ChangeBot

ChangeBot helps software teams communicate with their customers by looking through the code changes they’ve shipped and translating them into customer-facing release notes. It’s a small company building in one of the fastest-moving corners of software — AI — where, as Brian puts it, “every three months, everything is totally different.” New competitors appear constantly. For a founder wearing every hat, that pace makes keeping a read on the market feel impossible, and makes the cost of missing a move surprisingly high.

The challenge: flying blind

For Brian, the problem was never that competitive intelligence didn’t matter. It was that there was never room for it. “I don’t have the time to keep up with my competitors at all,” he said. “There’s always way too much stuff to do.”

The cost showed up in the worst possible place — in front of customers. “It’s the most embarrassing thing in the world when you go to talk to one of your customers and they say, ‘Did you see this thing that your competitor just did?’ And you have to honestly say no.”

Building in AI made it sharper. Competitors were shipping, repricing, and repositioning faster than any one founder could track by hand, and new ones kept showing up. Brian wasn’t looking for another dashboard to babysit. He needed something that would watch the market for him and tell him when something actually mattered.

Why ChangeBot chose KeepTabz

What sold Brian was that KeepTabz fit the one schedule he actually had: none. Instead of asking him to carve out time for competitive analysis, it reads every competitor signal, scores it for impact, and pushes the handful that matter straight into Slack.

“When am I gonna block out time in my schedule to do competitive analysis? It’s like never,” he said. The daily competitive digest flips that. The work comes to him.

The first login was humbling. “The first time you load it up, you’re like, yeah, I was flying blind a little bit,” Brian said — there were moves he’d missed entirely. But that was the point. KeepTabz tracks nine competitive signals — news, reviews, social, website and pricing changes, ads, SEO, and more — through one AI scoring engine that suppresses the noise a Google Alerts feed would bury him in. For a solo founder, the filtering matters as much as the coverage. He doesn’t want everything. He wants the few things worth knowing.

ChangeBot’s competitor tracking routine today

Brian’s routine is deliberately light. The Slack digest lands, and most days he scans it in a few minutes just to stay current. “Most of the time I’ll just scan through it and just be aware of what’s going on,” he said. “But one out of five times I see something I want to dive deeper into.”

He describes the product as a hire. “It’s a junior marketing associate that we’ve hired to our company that we don’t talk to any other time other than delivering me the most important information about what’s going on in our industry.” One of those deliveries flagged a competitor quietly switching to a billing model — a way of delivering the product Brian had never heard of before. Exactly the kind of move that’s easy to miss, and expensive to.

The results

• 5–10 minutes a day on competitor tracking, down from a half-hearted 5–6 hours a week
• That old 5–6 hours, Brian says, returned “zero value” — now he calls himself “a thousand times more educated”
• Caught a competitor switching to a billing model he’d never seen before
• Roughly 1 in 5 daily digests surfaces something worth a deeper dive
• Traded “flying blind” for an always-on read on a market that resets every ~3 months

The headline isn’t the time saved, though that’s real. It’s the return on it. Brian had been spending more time before and getting less for it. Now a few minutes a day keeps him ahead of a market he used to feel behind on — and out of those awkward customer conversations.

"Now I spend five, ten minutes a day, and I'm a thousand times more educated than before"

What’s next

For Brian, the value is less about any single alert and more about staying oriented over time. “Being aware of the market consistently over a large period of time helps make sure that we’re building the right stuff in our product,” he said. As ChangeBot grows in a category that keeps reinventing itself, he plans to keep leaning on KeepTabz as the early-warning system that keeps product and positioning pointed in the right direction.

Building in a market that won’t sit still? See how KeepTabz keeps you from getting blindsided — start a free 14-day trial.