Finding sites that are growing

One thing I’ve always enjoyed and am good at is finding websites or products that are clearly gaining traction, then trying to reverse engineer what’s making them work. It also gives me ideas for what I could build next.

If a site is growing, there’s usually something worth learning. I’m especially interested in businesses that are running paid ads because it tells me they’ve likely found a channel they can scale, which also means there’s a potential distribution path if I wanted to enter that space.

I ended up building a tool to track all of this for myself (StatPilot.dev), and have started opening it up for others to use.

Curious if anyone else has a similar process. When you’re researching competitors or looking for new ideas, what signals or data do you pay the most attention to?

Also DMs are open to share insights