Comments:"Why Entrepreneurs Are Bad at Finding Their Competition (and how you can do better) — Brian Sirkia"
URL:http://www.berserkia.com/blog/doing-a-competitive-analysis
It generally takes 20-30 hours to dig up all of the players in a space, which seems like a long time to spend looking. But, compared to spending 6-12 months building a product, 20-30 hours now isn't bad at all. Not putting in the hard yards looking is being blissfully ignorant.
That doesn't mean that just because there's always lots of competition, the opportunity isn't there. If an entrepreneur spots a pain point, that means the market for solving it hasn't been completely filled. More importantly, a thorough market analysis is not to be discouraging: it's a way to become an expert in a space and learn vicariously through competition.
This is my process of performing a market analysis, using the example of a fake Rideshare website:
1) Make a Google Spreadsheet with the the following columns: "Name", "Website", "Year Founded", "Funding", "Traction", "Strengths", and "Opportunities". Traction is how many users they have, their growth, and ideally, revenue, Strengths is what they're doing well and opportunities is what you plan to differently/better.