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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

What is the total size of this market - how many users/seats are there out there for this?

Not sure.

In the US there are about 281,400 civil engineers [1]. I couldn't find more detailed information on structural engineers.

-Assume about 10% are practicing structural engineers who need to design concrete structures = 28140.

-Assume a company wants 1 license for every 2 engineers = 14070. (I base this off the fact that my company has 6 licenses for 12 engineers, but we may be higher than average)

-Assume we could get 10% market share = 1407 subscribers.

-Assume $1000/subscriber/year = $1,407,000 from the US market

Obviously this isn't a very rigourous analysis.

[1]: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/civil-en...

So, current market size about 10k * 14,070 = 140M.

Its at least a structured analysis. Thanks for teaching something today.

I think this is an overoptimistic view of the size of the market. The field is highly fragmented. A large fraction of structural engineers are contractors or work for smaller firms (think wood design, rather than concrete/steel) and wouldn't be target customers for section analysis and concrete detailing software. An absolute majority of those that work for the larger firms don't require anything more than Excel spreadsheets. From my experience, a typical structural engineer is a rather savvy computer user, often times writing Excel macros or AutoLISP scripts to automate their tasks.

A large not-going-name-it software package for modeling steel and concrete structures creates alone over 100M a year. It hardly dominates the market so depending on how the market is segmented a good estimate is probably any number between 1 and 10 times this.

Single seat licences are not the only revenue model. Once a product gains traction consulting, training and providing VIP helpdesk and bugfixing services factor in as well.

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