
Ask HN: How do you perform market research for your ideas? - cloudking
In early stages of ideation, I like to do some basic market research to answer questions like:<p>1) what is the current size of this market?<p>2) what is the size of the total addressable market?<p>3) who are the main competitors in this market?<p>4) what are the product&#x2F;service gaps in this market?<p>5) what are the known user metrics in this market?<p>I usually start by searching Google. This typically leads me to SEO optimized blog posts, where companies have cherry-picked specific market data to justify their own products. The data is usually from industry research reports (e.g Gartner, Forester) that cost thousands of dollars to access the full versions. In early stages of ideation, it doesn&#x27;t always make sense to spend so much.<p>How do you perform market research for your ideas?
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trilinearnz
I've found that generally you can extract the Gartner magic quadrant charts
for particular product categories through a simple Google Image search. This
in itself can give you a good "first blush" of the competitive profile of a
market.

G2 is another avenue, albeit at a less scientific level. It gives you a
leader/loser chart similar to the magic quadrant.

For anything more detailed, you pretty much have to pay up to the usual
suspects of market research firms. Maybe you could form a syndicate of other
interested parties to contribute to the full cost?

~~~
mindcrime
Also, vendors that are mentioned in those Magic Quadrant reports sometimes get
copies they can (and do) distribute gratis. They will often be linked on their
website, but you may have to "sign up" and give them your email address to get
the download.

~~~
cloudking
Thanks both! This was really helpful, found a few free reports already with
this method

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this2shallPass
Talk with potential customers

[https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-
test](https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test)

~~~
cloudking
Definitely makes sense, but I'm also interested in broad market research that
talking to customers doesn't always get you

------
muzani
One thing that struck me was listening to a pitch to a VC, where the VC
responded, "If there is no competition, there is no market."

So I figure the shortcut is to look for competition first. You want to see
something in a large market, which makes you scratch your head why such a
shitty app has so many users. Or if you think customer service agencies are
doing such a horrible job that a robot can be more polite.

The next thing is ask yourself how you can make something 10x better than it
is. This is where tech really comes in - if they have a long development
roadmap and are slow, see if you can use tech to outpace them. If they're
being held back by a middle man partner, see if you can use tech to automate
the middle man (like taxi companies). Or if you're lucky, it's an app with
hundreds of thousands of monthly users that crashes all the time.

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mindcrime
Are you looking to sell something to consumers, or to businesses?

~~~
cloudking
I'm exploring ideas in both areas, most are for businesses

~~~
mindcrime
Gotcha. I won't even touch the consumer side, because I don't know much about
it.

On the business side... it's not possible to do justice to this topic in a HN
post. Books could be (and have been) written on this. But I can share a few
thoughts.

If you're selling in the US (or really, North America) the following applies.
If not, similar ideas probably apply in other countries.

1\. Look at the NAICS codes[1] as a possible starting point for how to segment
your potential customers.

2\. There is Census Bureau data on how many companies there are and how big
they are, in the various categories. Using this could give you the earliest
"rough cut" of a total market size

3\. Read _The Four Steps to the Epiphany_ for more on how to drill in and
learn more about specific customers / industries, and start finding
prospective initial customers.

4\. Beyond the Gartner / Forrester / etc. reports, there are some generic
industry survey / report things "out there". I can't remember the names off-
hand, but several of those things are in the "would ordinarily cost big money"
category, BUT can often times be accessed from your local library for free.

5\. Dun & Bradstreet bought out the company that used to be Hoovers, who
offered a relatively cheap ($99 / month or so) subscription to their services
which included all sorts of industry information, surveys, and the like, in
addition to detailed contact info for (many) individuals. I think D&B killed
off Hoovers and rebranded / repackaged it and I don't know how much the
equivalent offering (if there even is one) costs now, but it might not hurt to
call them up and say "What do you have now that's like the old Hoovers
product, and how much does it cost?". If you can afford it, you might find
that useful.

6\. There's a lot of additional data available from govt sources that you can
probably use to help you get ideas about your market. Poke around the various
sites like Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Anlysis, the SUSB
(Statistics of U.S. Businesses) stuff, etc. You'll have to be creative in
terms of figuring out how to use this to infer things about the market(s) you
want to sell to.

All of this will get you a rough idea of the approximate market size, but be
wary of your assumptions. If you say, for example, to yourself "We will sell
to companies in NAICS codes 14, 23, and 97, and that represents 398,244
companies that have an average spend for our product category of $100,000 /
year" and you do the math and say "that's our market", then you will have
problems. That's where the _Four Steps_ stuff comes in, and actually talking
to people. "Get out of the building" as Steve Blank says. Why? Because it's
almost inevitable that you will find that not all (or even most) "companies in
NAICS code 14, that spend $100,000 / year on IT solutions" will be interested
in what you are pitching.

Anyway, that's an extremely superficial overview of some ways you can get at
least a ballpark idea of market size for some B2B scenarios. Consumer, again,
is a different ballgame in many ways and I'll refrain from even trying to
comment on that. I guess the only other thing I'd add is go to Amazon.com,
look up a couple of books on "market research" that have cheap used copies
available, and order a couple of run through them.

[1]: [https://www.census.gov/NAICS](https://www.census.gov/NAICS)

