Write a Business Plan Challenge. 2. Market Opportunity

Write a Business

Plan Challenge.

2. Market Opportunity

The next step of writing your Business Plan for 2022 is to find the product-market fit and best way to sell your product or service.

If you did the assignments last week, you should know the strength and weaknesses of your product now, as well as the pain it is solving for the target audience. Go back to the previous postand do the assignments if you missed it. It will take not more than 30 mins.

1. Industry analysis (macro level).

Is the industry market rising or falling? You can easily find such metrics online. Those thousand million digits may mean not much to you if you are not trying to raise funds with a venture capital.

What you will need to pay attention to is the industry growth data. Are the graphs growing? Good, you choose a promising market. Is it falling or barely developing? This may indicate that there are little opportunities for you and it could be better to look for a different opportunity. Here is a link to many market size and market share resources.

2. Micro market analysis.

Here we will try to figure out your TAM (total addressable market). Why? Although the global numbers may be great, your own opportunity depends on your situation. If you only work on Upwork - go and check how many job posts there are for your particular product. If you live in a small town and sell something offline - you will be limited by the town population, so think if you in fact can ready enough clients for you product. After you calculate the number - look at it and see if the opportunity is big enough to get you to the Point B you described 2 weeks ago.

If you want to find out more about TAM, follow this link.
Take into consideration that your resources are also limited - will you be able to serve all those people from your TAM to reach the desired revenue?

3. Competitor analysis.

Do you like spreadsheets? It's the best way to do a competitive research. First - determine the most important criteria important for your business. Then fill it in with data about your competitors. Look at what the market leaders do and why the clients choose them. Your goal is not to copy, but to find a gap among your competitors that you can fill and how your product can be more superior or unique for your clients.

4. Promotion.

So, you now have a product & price (post #1), place (step 2 - your town or Upwork). You are lacking Promotion step from the Marketing mix (more on it here ).

Promotion includes advertising, public relations, or direct sales, for example. Depending on your budget and other resources, try to come up with at 3-5 channels you can test in 2022 for customer acquisition. We've added an image with different channels to chose from below. Write a draft plan on what you will do for each channel next year. Then test them to see which channel brings most qualified customers at the cheapest price for your particular business.

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