

Ask HN: Teach me market research. What do you use for market research? - rgovind

I would like to be able to evaluate size of market and find out number of people who have the problem I wish to solve. How would you go about finding this information? For example, I want to write better mortgage calculators and make a webapp around lies real estate agents tell. It will be similar to bankrate.com. How do I go about finding how many people will click on my links and how much I will earn?<p>More generally, How do you decide  what idea to pursue? I understand the &quot;scratch your own itch&quot; heuristic. But in my case, I have a few itches and I would like to go after them based on market potential.
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loumf
For your specific problem:

[http://www.zillow.com/research/data/](http://www.zillow.com/research/data/)

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rgovind
Thanks. This is really valuable.

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Terr_
I work for a market-research company which does this, but it's usually for
other big companies.

Are you trying to estimate the _size_ or your total possible consumer-base, or
are you trying to _sample_ a very small subset and ask them questions?

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rgovind
I am trying to estimate size of total possible consumer base. I believe this
is same as Total Addressable Market.

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Terr_
Hmm, sorry, that's a bit outside the intranet-app stuff I do. All I can think
of is somehow getting the odds of those people from within a known demographic
and multiplying... At the same time, it sounds like a kind of statistic which
a lot of mortgage/realty places probably already know or track.

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avinassh
well is there any company which does market research for your app? that would
be nice!

