Opportunity Analysis

"Lay Of The Land"

Market research can be devilishly tricky...

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What is your market, anyway? If your solution is unique or innovative, its very definition changes as you go deeper: Some features are touted by one segment, while companies in another segment serve your ideal customers...

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First thing is to analyze the market for its players, their offerings, their business models, their pricing, their target customers.

Then we map the market to segments and subsegments on several axes, to find where your company can shine.

What do your competitors do? How well do they do it?

And what can you do that they cannot?

Understand your competitors positioning and offering:

- What do they say about themselves?

- What core functionalities do they offer?

- To what kind of customers?

- What is their business model?

- And what is the pricing model?

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Articulate your own capabilities, offering, and how will you communicate it to the world:

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- The features only you will offer

- The price only you can benefit from

- The unserved segment you are targeting

- The moat you are to build, preventing others to surpass you

- And how will you capture this into a catch phrase?

What will you offer that no one else can?

Based on your unique vision of the market, and on your meticulous segmentation, you concentrate the functionalities you offer to your target customers.

You tailor the pricing model to balance growth and profitability.

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You position yourself in a place where you shine best.

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With that you go out to the world.

How will you reach customers?

Now that we know what are you selling to whom, distribution is the challenge:

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- Channel partners: selection, signup

- Indoctrination, co marketing

- Incentives, markups

- Customer pricing

- Exclusivity and terms

Making Money

Having defined the market, the product, the business model, we now analyze the potential:

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- Fixed costs

- Marketing expenses

- Sales cost and targets

- Delivery / production costs

- Profit margins

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We then broaden the base case through sensitivity analyses to find key performance indicators, break even point, and finally, a go-no go decision.