Identifying user personas is critical to your agenda.

I originally come from South Africa, where the best "tech" startups are fundamentally copies of successful businesses in the USA or EU.

The advantage, of course, is that they can copy many of the aspects of the original market leader: UX, UI, user acquisition strategies, growth tactics, business models etc. They also have a great use-case for raising capital and a potential exit to a local player, PE firm or the original company they copied when the company expands to their shores.

So the key piece of advice: research who their ideal customer is. Read all the articles interviewing the team and watch videos where they discuss these issues. Want to be really sneaky? Get someone to interview them for you. Stalk them on social.

There are a variety of other tools you could be using to analyze their followers on different social media channels to discover who the ideal persona is as well. EG: Sprout Social.

Another thing to do: join their boards and see if you can get some business for yourself to see if you can get a handle on what the interactions are like.