Competitive Intelligence · Market Intelligence · Strategic Insights
I turn ambiguous market questions into decisions.
Eight years reading markets, competitors and customers at A.P. Moller Maersk & Beroe and making the call
Let’s investigate your next move →
Strategic Curiosity
8+ years market & competitive intelligence / Maersk & Beroe / 15+ competitors torn down / logistics · tech · FMCG · pharma · energy / global stakeholders / Gartner MQ contributor
featured Work — Real Questions, Real Calls
Investigation 01 · TALENT & GCC
Headcount Moved to India. Decision Rights Mostly Didn't.
Context: A GCC measuring its own maturity by the wrong number.
Everyone says India's centres do strategic work now. The hiring data agrees. The reporting lines tell on the other half.
The Decision
Move one headquarters decision, with the budget attached, to the person you already pay like a leader.
Investigation 02 · MARKET ENTRY
I Told the Founder to Drop Two of His Three Markets.
Context: One product, light purse, three countries he wanted at once.
Split the budget three ways and in the US it buys you invisibility. Here is the math that ended the argument.
The Decision
US first, fully funded. Earn the next two.
Investigation 03 · AI x INTELLIGENCE
My New Analyst Is Fast, Fluent, and Occasionally Lies.
Context: I ran my own week through AI and checked its work.
It wrote me a market size with a citation that did not exist. What automated, what broke, what I will not let it decide.
The Decision
Automate the scanning. Never let it decide what matters.
BS
Balaji Sridhar - the analyst behind the lab
Eight years at Maersk and Beroe doing competitive intelligence and market entry.
The short version of what I learned: research only counts when it changes a decision. So I time it to land before the call is made, and I say what I think should happen. The pieces here are me doing that in the open.
01 Question
Find the question nobody asks.
02 Hypothesis
Commit to a falsifiable thesis.
03 Evidence
Pressure-test with data.
04 The Decision
Say what you'd do.
The Lab — live
Live · Updated Weekly
Signals I’m tracking
Latest
Quick-commerce keeps getting called a delivery business. The number I am watching is the take-rate, because that is where it is quietly turning into an ads business, and the GMV everyone quotes is the least interesting line in the model.
JUN 11
GLP-1 is reshaping the protein and collagen shelf faster than the brands sitting on it are repositioning. Most of them still think they are selling beauty. The buyer has moved to "lean mass" and the packaging has not caught up.
Jun 04
GCC mandates are localising slowly, and the conversation is still stuck on headcount. The number that actually matters is decision rights, and almost nobody is tracking where sign-off physically happens. The org chart knows. The press release does not.
Open hypotheses · in the lab now
Testing
The Boring Winner series: unglamorous companies quietly winning a category, and why.
Drafting
Most competitive moats are narrated long after they’re built.
Testing
Where the puck is going: a 3-year demand-signal map for energy sector.
Frameworks — Built From Real Teardowns, Not For This Website
Signal-to-Thesis Model
Turns scattered market signals into a single falsifiable thesis you can act on.
Built from Eight years of secondary-research synthesis
Competitive Drift Index
Measures where rivals are quietly drifting away from their stated strategy.
Built from 15+ logistics-competitor teardowns at Maersk
Blind Spot Framework
Surfaces the belief a market holds that is most likely to be wrong.
Built from Supplier and market-entry studies, including work touching organisations like Merck and BASF3
“The best question is rarely ‘what happened.’ It’s ‘what did everyone believe that turned out to be wrong.’”