How to use the Five competitive forces template

Start a board from it
Use this template opens a new Freero board with the Five competitive forces template on it (sign up free first). On a board you already have, open Templates in the toolbar and search for “Five competitive forces”.
Follow the instruction on the board
“Rate each force low, medium or high and say why. A market is attractive when most forces are low; your strategy should weaken the high ones.”
Fill in each part
- Threat of new entrants How hard is it for a newcomer to start competing?
- Power of buyers How easily can customers switch or push prices down?
- Rivalry among current players How fiercely do existing competitors fight on price, features and marketing?
- Power of suppliers How much do the companies you depend on control your costs?
- Threat of substitutes What else solves the same need in a different way?
Bring your team and your agents
Invite people to the board or share a link, and work on it together live. The timer is in the top bar, private mode and voting in the board menu, and Claude or ChatGPT can join through Freero’s MCP server.

Work on it with an AI agent

Connect an assistant once and it works on the board with you, with your permissions: by default it reads and proposes, and people decide.

You ask: “Fill in the Five competitive forces board from these notes.”
What happens It reads the board, then proposes sticky notes for it. Nothing changes until someone on the board accepts them.
You ask: “Group what we wrote into themes and list the actions.”
What happens It proposes clusters with a title each and task cards for the actions, labelled with its name and yours.

PESTLE analysis
Scan the outside world in six lenses: political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental forces that could affect you.
Growth options matrix
Four ways to grow: sell more of what you have, build new things for current customers, take what you have to new markets, or do both.
Issue tree
Break a big question into smaller ones that don’t overlap and together cover it, so a team can split the work and test each part.
Value chain map
Follow how your organisation turns inputs into something customers pay for, step by step, and mark where you add or lose value.
Scenario planning
Pick the two biggest uncertainties about the future, cross them, and describe the four worlds that result, so plans hold up in each.
Strategy on a page
The whole strategy on one board: why you exist, where you compete, why you win, the few priorities, how you measure them and what you stop.