What do I need to start a baseline?

A URL. If the client has no site yet, or the site says little, a written brief works instead. Uploads in PDF, Word, PowerPoint or HTML can be added to either.

How long does the first baseline take?

Hours, not days. The profile, ICPs and products are usually ready the same working day, with competitors and segments following.

Can I correct something the baseline got wrong?

Yes. Every field is editable and every score can be overridden. Your corrections are kept on rebuild, and the workspace tells you what it would have changed.

Does the client need to give me internal data?

No. The baseline is built from public sources only: the client's site, competitors' sites and the open web. That keeps the picture free of internal bias and safe to share.

Is the gap analysis about the client or about competitors?

Both. The baseline names the gaps in the client's own value propositions first, then the competitive benchmark on the Strength Matrix shows where each competitor is stronger or weaker on the same categories.

Company baseline and gap analysis

Gap & company analysis
Baseline
Capability gaps

The baseline is the deliverable nobody bills for

Every engagement starts the same way. Before a consultant can say anything useful about positioning, market or competitors, they need a clear picture of the company as it is today: what it sells, to whom, what it claims, and what it is missing. That picture is the baseline. It takes a week of reading, and most of it never makes it into the deck.

A Haycion workspace builds the baseline from one input. Point it at the client’s URL, or give it a written brief if the site says too little, and it assembles the company analysis you would otherwise write by hand. You check it, correct it, and walk into the first meeting knowing more about the client’s business than the people across the table expect.

What goes into a 360° baseline

The baseline is not a summary of the homepage. The workspace reads the whole public footprint and structures it into the parts a gap analysis needs.

Company profile. Who the company is, what it does, the markets it operates in and the story it tells about itself, written as the market sees it rather than as the client describes it.
Products and features. Each product with its features, and a feature importance score so you can see at a glance which capabilities carry the offer and which are filler.
Ideal customer profiles and personas. The buyers the company is built for, with a priority score from 1 to 100 per persona, their pain points, the value proposition that speaks to them, and what to fix in how the company addresses them.
Value propositions with their gaps. The claims the company makes, rated for effectiveness, with the gaps named: a claim with no proof behind it, a persona no claim addresses, a capability competitors talk about and the client does not.
SWOT. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, each tied to evidence from the profile rather than written from general impressions.
Case studies. Customer stories extracted from the public site, so proof points are ready to quote when the value propositions need them.

Each part links to the others. A persona points at the value proposition written for it; a gap points at the persona it leaves unaddressed; a case study points at the claim it proves.

Where the gap analysis comes from

A gap analysis is only as good as the benchmark it is measured against. In a workspace the benchmark is built in two layers.

The first layer is internal. The baseline compares what the client claims against what it can prove, and what it sells against who it says it serves. That surfaces the capability gaps that live inside the company’s own story: the persona with no proof point, the product whose most important feature goes unmentioned.

The second layer is competitive. Once competitors are found and scored on the Strength Matrix, the same value-proposition categories are scored for the client and for every competitor. A gap is then a category where the client scores below the field, with the justification for each score written out so you can see why.

What the client receives

A company baseline they can read in ten minutes and argue with in twenty.
A ranked list of personas with a priority score and the reasoning behind it.
Their value propositions rated, with each gap named and tied to a persona or a competitor.
A SWOT grounded in evidence, not adjectives.
Products with feature importance, so the roadmap conversation starts from what the market values.
A “what changed” note every time the baseline is rebuilt.

How it shows its work

Nothing in the baseline is a black box. Every score has a written justification you can read, and every field can be edited or overridden. When you change a persona’s priority or a value proposition’s rating, the parts that depend on it update with it, and the workspace keeps your correction on the next rebuild. Public data only, nothing from inside the client, so the reasoning is always something you can show the client without embarrassment.

What changed since last time

A baseline goes stale. Companies ship features, change pricing, drop a segment and add another, and the deck from three months ago quietly becomes wrong. Rebuild the workspace and it does not just overwrite the old picture. It tells you what changed: a new product, a claim that disappeared, a persona whose priority moved. That list is often the most useful page in a quarterly review, because it turns “here is your company” into “here is what your company did since we last spoke”.

What a result looks like

A typical first baseline for a mid-market software company runs to a profile, three to five personas with priorities, two to four products with feature importance scores, a set of value propositions with two or three named gaps, a SWOT and a handful of case studies. Rebuild it after a quarter and the “what changed” note is usually a short list: one new feature, one claim rewritten, one persona whose priority moved.

The point is not the volume. It is that the baseline is structured, sourced and correctable, so everything built on it later, from the competitive benchmark to the positioning recommendations, inherits that rigour.