Any good books about Market Size Analysis?

One could write a whole treatise on this topic, but you're right, there's surprisingly little out there considering how many people do this stuff. Basically, it's an art, and all the official-looking reports out there are a lot more approximate than you might imagine.

Anyway, I wrote a blog post on it recently. Hope it's helpful.

I'm new to the forum. I hope this helps.

I also wish I had the bling to splurge for these market reports. As a broke startup who writes business proposals without the guarantee of a contract, I definitely will not pay for a $200 report.

So I just go straight to the source and factor in cost, labor, revenue, and identify what ever measure it is I might be able to alleviate in cost, add value to, etc. For the ice cream industry one of the largest costs is packaging. So why not create some marketing opportunity, by reducing packaging cost, use something recyclable which you can then approach the government for some type of grant that promotes the environment and reducing carbon foot print, get national press and be the green leader in the industry.

In regards to national trends there is plenty of information available online as industry trends are widely publicized for investors so it's really just a matter of identifying the trends you want to find; volatility, growth, cost, revenue, etc

I'm working on a business proposal for a local Ben & Jerry's. Went to the factfinder.census.gov page and filtered the data based on industry (ice cream manufacturing) and found pretty much all the data I needed.

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/IBQTable?_bm=y&-NAICSASM=31152|311520&-ds_name=AM0831GS101&-ib_type=NAICSASM&-_industry=311520&-_lang=en

As far as trends over time, I found

http://www.idfa.org/resource-center/market-information/update-on-dairy-markets/market-update-archive/

Also

When you identify the report provider, they'll highlight the types of data they provide, google them. So I found this website, anythingresearch.com

http://www.anythingresearch.com/industry/Ice-Cream-and-Frozen-Dessert-Manufacturing.htm

And in it they list the sources from which they use to compile their report

Source: Analysis of US Census data

Source: Analysis of U.S. federal statistics

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Source: Analysis of IRS tax returns

Bare DIY. I wouldn't recommend this to everyone. But, if you like to stare at data all day, why not? Good luck. I'll try to improve my writing and try to be less choppy. I'm still new to forums in general.

You can generally get reports for free but you will find they are more dated (ie 04-05 reports).

http://www.eiu.com http://www.businessmonitor.com

are two good places to start. Both do publish some free resources.

Sorry, i don't have any specific books or sources to suggest. My advice is more general - that regardless of your industry or business you should try to use multiple methods to estimate your market.

Each approach builds in a lot of bias, based on how the analysis is done, the types of data it requires, and the assumptions/estimates you have to make.

Try to estimate your overall market a few different ways (relying on different primary sources). It may turn out that there's a lot of uncertainty int he size itself, regardless of how precise any individual estimate can look.

Good luck! -Michael