What is market sizing?

- Defining and sizing your market. Now this is a really important step to the overall process. This is really going to be key to your overall business strategy. Now, I see entrepreneurs make a mistake all the time and I want to make sure you don't make the same mistake. And I call it kind of the 1% rule, where they basically say if I just get 1% of the market, I'm going to be a millionaire, or maybe a billionaire, for those that think really aggressively. Now the important thing is I don't want you to go in to an investor and say all we need is 1% of the market. We're going to all make a lot of money. They will throw you out very quickly 'cause it really affects your credibility overall, so you don't want to do that. What we want to do instead is we actually want to get into a segmenting exercise where we start at the industry and we actually start to segment down from the industry, to start defining our market, right? And then more and more, we're just simply narrowing things down, until we actually get to our core market, which is really where our sweet spot is, and that's what we want. We want this nice, beautiful core market that then we can actually market to and sell lots of products and services. That's what investors want to hear. So defining a market can be a bit tricky, but it's really important that we nail this one down. It's tricky because sometimes the information that's out there is not exactly how you want it packaged or you might define it in a different way. Don't worry though, because you get some freedom in how you actually define your industry and your market. As you get smaller and smaller, as it's get more meaningful to your business, you can control more of how you define it. The key, though, is the narrowing down process, and that is going to reign supreme in terms of how this actually works. Now, why is this important? Well, if you don't define your industry and your market effectively, you really can't size it. Also, you can't calculate your growth rates, and you've got to be able to calculate your growth rates in your business plan. And finally, your competition, your competitive landscape, becomes very difficult if you don't have a really good definition.