Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets

No, it's not. It might take more than a Google search.

You can extract what you want from US business census data. See "data.census.gov". Look for NAICS codes with a small number, but greater than 3, companies, and high dollar amounts for the category.

View on HN

It seems there are 19 codes: https://www.naics.com/search-naics-codes-by-industry/. I'm interested in more granularity e.g. where "mobile video editing software" appears on the map, show me the market size, top companies, estimated sales, etc.

That's just the top level of NAICS codes. For example, 441320 is tire dealers. 512191 is "Teleproduction and Other Postproduction Services"[1]

"Mobile video editing software" is a product type, not a business type. If you want product categories, you need a different data source. Such as Amazon's, or Google's or Alibaba's product tree. Here's Google's product hierarchy.[2] Google category 4953 is "Software > Computer Software > Multimedia & Design Software > Video Editing Software".

If you want such results handed to you without much work on your part, you may have to pay a company which collects such data. NAICS or D&B or some of the mailing list companies could make you a list.

[1] https://www.naics.com/code-search/?naicstrms=video

[2] https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-i...

Thanks for that. I think the NAICS codes could be fleshed out a little to be more relevant and useful.

Not to beat this example to death, but there is a market for mobile video editing applications and I have no idea of its size. Wikipedia only lists one iOS product. I feel there would be a lot of value in providing this kind of information easily to people. I personally don't want to engage with a market research firm during the exploratory phase.

So you're saying it's an area... without a lot of competition...

I've been doing research on this exact category myself (after having previously had some modest success on the image editing side.) You're severely underestimating the number of competitors. Try searching the relevant app stores instead of Wikipedia (why would you ever even check here?).

Right, I was making the point that there should be more info online about the entire mobile video editing app market (one example). I know there are many such apps in the stores.

I think parent was complaining that there's very little public information (particularly hard numbers) about the incumbents. GP was cruising Wikipedia for information about the apps' parent companies rather than just trying to identify the apps.

It's easy to see how many apps are in the store. It's a lot harder to know how much money they are grossing.

Do you realize that you just posted an idea for a niche business?

I agree, it's not that hard to map out markets. I have relied on third party business intelligence softwares like Tracxn to get good overview of markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com