How Do I Define and Research a Market and Estimate Market Share

Marketing your startup takes many forms. The classical marketing approach revolves around the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Promotion and Place.

In this question and answer, we will discuss place, which refers to the marketplace where you will sell your products. Place also includes doing market research and market share estimates.

Defining your marketplace, doing research and estimating market share are iterative processes that don’t really have any good algorithms to apply. A lot of the time, it’s trial and error and looking at what your competitors are doing.

These questions are answers address defining the market, researching it and estimating market share.

• Big Market, Small Share Method : This one is the classic — I will get 1% of a 1 Trillion dollar market. Most investors will call you naive and pretty much reject you idea.
• Market Gap Analysis : This is a great thread on how to determine what type of business to start.
• List of Resources for Market Size Analysis : Lists both public and private resources for market analysis
• Market Validation : Discusses some inexpensive methods to validate your market.
• How to Get Reliable Survey Results : Some good ideas on making marketing surveys better.
• Application Research : A clever idea about researching demand for software applications.
• Market Research Outsourcing : How to outsource the research but not the thinking.