So you have a hot new idea, and you need to build a solid business plan. It's free, it's fast, and with all the different search engines it can be pretty smart, too.
Entrepreneurs use the Web to study their competition.
Many visit their competitors' sites and study their products and strategies. But you don't need to stop there. There are plenty of good sources to help uncover the competition you may not even know exists. These sites offer gold mines of directories and company data which you can use to identify leaders and key players, research patents, study companies' financial data, read up on news, and gain insights into the marketplace. A major challenge of Web research is sifting through the sheer number of sites that are returned by search engines.