Automated Weekly Gaming Intelligence Reports for Hike

1. Introduction

Product Name: Weekly Gaming Intelligence Engine
User (TA): Hike Private Limited
Category: Competitive Intelligence Automation (Gaming Industry)
Vision: To automate competitive intelligence across major Indian gaming companies, enabling Hike to stay ahead strategically without spending hours on manual research.

2. Problem Statement

Hike competes in a highly dynamic gaming ecosystem where rivals like WinZO, Dream11, MPL, Zupee, and Gameskraft continuously evolve through:

New product launches,

Key hires and leadership moves,

Funding and partnerships,

Regulatory updates,

Blog and PR activities.

Challenges faced by Hike’s strategy & research team:

Manual competitor tracking required 20+ hours/week, spread across LinkedIn, news, blogs, and funding updates.

Intelligence was scattered across multiple platforms, delaying decision-making and weekly reviews.

Risk of missing critical updates (e.g., funding round announcements, new hires in tech leadership).

Problem in one line:
“How can Hike get structured, weekly competitor intelligence across 5 major gaming players, in one consolidated, actionable report?”

3. Solution Overview

We designed and deployed an automated competitive intelligence pipeline that:

Runs weekly (every Monday, 9 AM).

Scrapes company updates from LinkedIn, blogs, funding trackers, and news articles.

Extracts structured intelligence (hiring, funding, launches, partnerships).

Generates a Weekly Report with a priority alert section for high-impact developments.

Pushes output to Google Sheets Dashboard + Email Summary for leadership.

This transformed competitor tracking from a manual, fragmented effort → to a reliable, automated system.

4. Target Users

Primary: Hike’s Strategy & Leadership Team (Founder’s Office).

Secondary: Product managers & research analysts tracking competitor moves.

5. Goals & Success Metrics

Goals:

Automate competitive intelligence tracking.

Deliver weekly actionable summaries.

Reduce research effort by >80%.

Success Metrics:

✅ Intelligence Coverage: 90%+ accuracy in pulling company updates.

✅ Time Saved: ~15–20 hours/week saved for research analysts.

✅ Weekly Consistency: Report delivered every Monday at 9 AM without fail.

✅ Strategic Impact: Leadership reported faster competitor awareness → better-informed decisions.

6. The Design & Development Process

Step 1 – Discovery & Research

Interviewed 5 stakeholders (strategy, product, research) → discovered that data collection, not analysis, consumed most time.

Benchmarked existing CI tools (Craft, Crayon, AlphaSense) → found they were too expensive or broad, not India-gaming-specific.

Decision: Build a custom lightweight automation tailored for Hike’s needs.

Step 2 – Core Features Defined

Company Content Search (LinkedIn, Blogs, News).

Content Extraction Processor – parse data into structured categories:

Hiring/People Moves

Product Launches

Funding/Partnerships

Blog/PR Updates

Priority Alert Detection – highlight only high-impact moves (e.g., Dream11 hiring a VP of Product, MPL raising $50M).

Google Sheets Dashboard – structured intelligence by company.

Weekly Intelligence Brief Email – summary of key developments + alerts.

Step 3 – Workflow Design

Tool Used: n8n Automation Platform, Lleverage

Flow:

Weekly Trigger → Company Search Nodes (WinZO, MPL, Dream11, Gameskraft, Zupee) → Content Extraction Processor → Alert Detection → Google Sheets + Email Report.

(Refer to workflow screenshot for full execution chain)

Step 4 – Pilot Phase

Launched with 5 companies (WinZO, MPL, Dream11, Zupee, Gamekraft) for 2 weeks.

Accuracy check: ~98% updates correctly categorized.

Feedback: Analysts wanted priority alerts highlighted separately.

Step 5 – Iterations

Added Priority Alert Generator node.

Improved filtering to avoid irrelevant results (e.g., old blog posts resurfacing).

Expanded scope to 5 companies total.

7. Challenges & Solutions

Noise in Data – Scrapers pulled irrelevant news.

✅ Solution: Trained filters with keywords (“funding”, “hiring”, “launch”) + regex-based parsing.

Overlapping Updates – Same news repeated across sources.

✅ Solution: Added deduplication logic in Google Sheets before saving.

Critical Alerts Missing – Some big news got buried in lists.

✅ Solution: Introduced priority alerts detection (funding > $10M, CXO-level hires).

Scalability – Needed to handle more companies later.

✅ Solution: Modular design → easy to plug new company nodes.

8. Monetization Model (Future Potential)

This system, while internal to Hike, could evolve into a SaaS Competitive Intelligence Tool for startups:

Subscription: $5–$10/month for automated weekly competitor briefs.

Verticalized: Gaming, Fintech, Edtech.

Premium: Multi-language tracking, AI-driven trend analysis.

9. Results & Impact

Time Savings: ~15–20 hours/week saved for the research team.

Consistency: Weekly brief delivered every Monday at 9 AM without fail.

Coverage: >90% of competitor updates captured across 5 companies.

Strategic Value: Leadership had instant visibility into competitor moves, enabling:

Faster reactions to funding & partnerships.

Better-informed product roadmaps.

Stronger board discussions with real-time intelligence.

10. Future Roadmap

Expand to 10+ competitors.

Add sentiment analysis of competitor PR & hiring moves.

Create visual dashboards with trendlines (funding over time, headcount growth).

Integrate with Slack/Telegram for real-time alerts.

11. Key Learnings as a Product Manager

Automate Low-Value, Manual Work: Research teams should spend time on analysis, not data collection.

Structured Output > Raw Data: Categorization into hiring/funding/launches was more valuable than just dumping links.

Alerts Drive Attention: Highlighting critical updates ensured leadership didn’t miss big moves.

Scalability by Design: Modular workflows let us expand competitors seamlessly.

📌 Conclusion

As the Founders Office Thinking as a  Product Manager, I led the end-to-end development of the Weekly Gaming Intelligence Automation for Hike.

The system transformed competitor tracking from a manual, time-consuming process into a reliable, automated intelligence engine, saving dozens of hours weekly and directly strengthening Hike’s strategic planning & competitive positioning.

This project demonstrated how AI + automation can augment human research teams, ensuring faster, smarter decisions in a highly competitive industry.