Ask HN: How does one identify markets and their sizes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does one identify markets and their sizes?

49 pointscronjobma14 comments

This is my job as a market researcher and analyst at VDC Research. We produce models and reports at my firm by interviewing executives at companies in each market we cover, surveying large samples of end users (embedded and IoT engineers), and integrating a lot of secondary and financial data into our models. We sell our research to vendors, consultancies, banks, etc. Happy to answer questions about the process.

I was always wondering do you actually pay the CEOs for the interviews? Or do they pay you for the brand recognition?

We don’t pay any executives or companies to participate in our research. Their incentive is to be be accurately represented in terms of company size, strategy, and positioning because their competitors and potential acquirers read the reports. There are some “pay to play” market research companies but we don’t engage in any of that (it’s basically just marketing), which is often targeted more at end users of the products instead of the vendors and investors.

We do pay end users (IoT and embedded engineers) for their time on surveys and interviews. Drop me an email if you want to be added to our email list. We usually offer a $40 amazon gift card or donation to Doctors Without Borders for a 30 minute survey, and we report feedback on hardware, software, and tools to vendors to help them improve their products.

Your characterization might indicate a different incentive, but I suppose everyone knows (and accounts for?) that…

For the record, I am a technical and sometimes creative grunt and this kind of research is far from my specialty.

The last time I tried to do this, I exhausted everything I could find on the internet and was still very short. I was researching a major professional user software sector and my only option at this point was an annual report sold by a private firm for around $4,000/year. They seemed open to bids but did not accept my extremely low ones. They did keep spamming me for a while, though. I never could tell if this was going to be legitimate. I wasn’t able to find reviews of the firm’s services, and even if I could have afforded it, I expect I would have been too suspicious to follow through.

Pardon my ignorance but why do you call it spamming when you contacted them first?

Likely referring to the rate/ratio of contact/response from the commenter you're replying to.

I guess I have a different definition, or at least a different threshold, for what I consider spam. This particular situation was not extreme but I still consider it spam. They continued emailing me around twice per month with the same offer despite me having been perfectly clear on at least two occasions that I was not interested. They did this for 14 months before giving up. I received another message at the 2 year mark that was an actual release announcement, which I do not consider spam.

It's more of an art than a science but you can triangulate depending on what you have and what you're trying to do.

If looking into existing markets and figuring out your angle into those - firms like Gartner, Forrester, as well as research arms of banks/consulting firms (Deloitte, JPM, BAML, etc) will have pretty good reports that you can purchase/search for (filetype:pdf can give some great results). I find these to be a good high level starting point and you can go deep on individual topics. "Value added research" can involve customer interviews, public surveys, hands on research (visiting a location), etc.

If it is established market, look at public companies and their financial statements. If not, you have to infer from "reasonable" assumptions.

Ideally, the question would have more specifics to warrant a better answer.

How To Identify Your Market And Size Up Competitors> https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccabagley/2013/10/02/how-to...

big banks publish a lot of market color & researh for exactly this purpose

Any good links to get us started?

Publish to the public? Would love to see what you mean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com