How to size and locate a market
You have a customer in mind and a country to sell in. This guide takes you from that to a defensible market size, the cities that hold most of it, and the places where it is unusually dense. It is one question and usually one tool call, analyze_market, for 3 credits.
Describe the customer in things that can be counted
Age range, income, household, what they own, what they pay for, what they care about. Three or four conditions is a good audience. Eight is usually an empty one.
- Instead of "young professionals", say "25 to 35, tertiary education, top income quartile".
- Instead of "eco-conscious families", say "households with children, high sustainability affinity".
Ask, and name the market
Type it into your assistant the way you would say it, and include a country, a region or a city. The place sets both the area that is searched and the baseline everything is compared with.
How many people aged 30 to 39 in the top income quartile live in the Netherlands, where are the biggest markets, and where are they most concentrated?
Read the three answers inside it
- The size. 791,760 people, 4.42% of the Netherlands. This is your addressable number.
- The composition. What makes them different from everyone else in the country: 85% full-time workers against 49%, twice as likely to have an informed-digital media diet. This is who you are talking to.
- The places. Core markets are where most of them live: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague. Hotspots are where they are over-represented: Amsterdam again, but also Leiden, Diemen and Delft. Volume decisions follow the first list, precision decisions the second.
Go one level down
Pick a city from either list and ask again inside it:
Same audience, but inside Amsterdam. Which neighbourhoods?
Within a city the breakdown drops to neighbourhoods and the 1 km² cells where the audience clusters. This is the part no public statistic gives you.
Going further
Households instead of people. For anything bought per home, such as heat pumps, broadband, insurance or a second car, ask about households. "How many owner-occupied households in Bavaria have solar and no electric car?"
People by their household. "How many children aged 3 to 10 in Germany live in a home with an electric car?" crosses the two. It costs 1 credit, and Describing an audience explains how it works.
Checking a claim. Paste the market-size line from a pitch deck and ask your assistant to break it into an audience and count it. The gap between the claim and the count is usually a conversation worth having.
Several countries. Ask per country, or compare them in one go. Income quartiles are national, so the top quartile in Bulgaria and in Denmark are both "the best-off quarter locally", which is usually what a market-entry question wants.
Worth knowing
If the answer comes back empty, it says why. An audience under 100 people is never shown, and the answer tells you whether to widen the place or loosen the audience. If no rows matched at all, a value is wrong and nothing needs widening. Reading an answer covers each case.
Next
You know how many and where. Choose between locations settles which place to go to first, and Plan reaching an audience takes the same audience, unchanged, and tells you how to sell to it.