Workshop: Market Estimation, Thu, Oct 31, 14:15-16:00
42% of startup fail, because there is no actual market need for their solution (https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/). Therefore, the most critical and challenging thing in the early days of a new venture is to find a solution for an important problem. After, you will need to fine tune your solution to achieve product-market fit. Starting a venture is hard, achieving product-market fit is even harder and that is where everything starts.
For Thursday’s lecture, please familiarize yourself with
A) Product-market fit by reading an excellent blog post by a16z: https://a16z.com/2017/02/18/12-things-about-product-market-fit/ (you can also find plenty of definitions and more good reads online)
B) Why large target market matters by reading Linus blog post about VC math: https://medium.com/swlh/one-reason-you-re-not-being-funded-vc-math-explained-73d87d35a383
Depending on your previous experience these pre-reads can be challenging. Please study before hand or ask during the lecture, if there is something you did not understand.
Help with your sprint assignment:
Basics of market sizing Total Available Market (also Addressable). Key take-away: Top-down market estimation from aggregate market data is "worse than useless" : https://youtu.be/_TgVjdxAcf4 , 7 min
When you try to estimate the market potential, there are a number of different ways in which to measure and evaluate your business. For this, companies use something called "metrics" ie data about the operations that can be measured and tracked. Here are some metrics to give you an idea about what type of numbers you could look for.
https://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/
https://a16z.com/2015/09/23/16-more-metrics/
Finally, here are 4 online tools that you can help gauge and compare interest for different things: , 7 min