Hot answers tagged market-analysis
9
It's got to be easier. Their customers, who will soon be your customers, need to be convinced that your service is easier to use and work with. Make their life easier when they use your service.
Cheaper might win some customers but it's a risky play - your competitor may well jump in and undercut you and then you've got a price war. I'd steer clear of ...
7
The most viable idea is obviously the one most generating the most profit. Profit is the difference of costs and revenue, so you need to estimate these two factors. In other words, you are basically shopping for information.
Now here's the more interesting part: According to the ‘information paradox’ (Arrow, 1962), there's no economic solution when shopping ...
7
Here are some variables you'll need to estimate:
Engagement Rate - This is the percentage of followers who will click on one of your links, retweet, like, etc... A typical engagement rate of a high quality audience is between 5 and 10 percent.
Impression Value - Assign a value for each impression you get from your audience. How much value do you place on ...
7
There is no inherent value to having any followers. The value of followers is contextual to the nature of the business. In his very good answer above @JonDiPietro lays out the necessary variables and formula for a traditional sales-based site. What he points out is that the value of the conversion -- meaning how much each follower purchases is essential for ...
5
Market research for anything but the biggest and best-covered markets (e.g., computer sales) is typically a painful process. In my opinion, there are a couple of different flavors to think about.
The first but probably less important aspect is the numbers you might want to put in your pitch deck or business plan - market size, share, etc. I'm not aware of ...
4
At Blue Fish, we have used Salesforce.com for about 5 years. We didn't do a full evaluation of the options, we just went with the product that our sales guy was familiar with at the time. Over the years, we've evolved how we use it.
We use salesforce in two primary ways:
To track sales person activity across our sales force - This is the classic use of a ...
4
This question is so broad that it is impossible to give any useful answer. I'd say search online for product of service similar to yours and start learning about your competition. Usually it doesn't take long before you can tell who the main players are and what you're going dealing with.
Industry related bulletin boards and forums is another good place to ...
4
Everything Ngu says is true, web-delivered software is the trend and for very good reasons.
However, I don't think you should just write off rich clients (or smart clients as I heard Microsoft refer to them) without . There are some applications where you need a very rich, interactive experience which is hard to do in a browser. As an example, I worked on ...
4
For something quick, dirty, and fairly cheap, try something like the following process:
Research potential competitors and their products and/or services and realistically assess whether or not you can provide a unique selling proposition that differs enough from the competition.
Use Google Trends, the
External Keyword Tool, and
the Traffic ...
4
Asking Them Directly
The key is to ask them when a) they already have in their mind a good of what your sample product should do and b) they are relaxed and conversational, and know for sure its not a sales call.
A great way to get them in this state is to start them off talking about their business process, what they like, what they don't like, and what ...
4
The price point and marketing strategies for attracting and satisfying general consumer and high end creative clients in stock photography is quite different as their budgets and needs are significantly different. I wouldn't assume that the same market place could attract both. Your whole model seems really vague. What type of dissatisfaction are you trying ...
3
Didn't your Econ 101 professor teach you there's no such thing as a free lunch?
Maybe a better question is: How do you get market analysis without too much money?
One answer is services like Ask Your Target Market. Easy and inexpensive way to ask questions.
3
Would a pure client-server solution be
"looked down on" as a product at this
day and age?
It should.
The reason I said this is because updates for client-server is a great hassle. You have to remember to update every single client machine whenever you make code changes.
Deployment is another issue. Instead of deploying on one machine ( ...
3
Well 37signals is not a social network. They are however probably the only company that is profitable.
The market size of social networks are potentially limitless but even though it's fairly easy to make revenue it's very hard to be profitable.
First and foremost because most social networks are ecosystems and start out as free.
Second of all because ...
3
Your team will always have lots of interesting ideas, so your goal should really be to figure out a mechanism and culture to evaluate the ideas often (i.e. not just now).
There are many ways of doing this. Here are some of them:
Building a minimum viable product is one way, ideally by just putting a small page up asking users to enter their e-mail address ...
3
Conducting classical market research is usually quite expensive and time consuming. You are looking at $5K+ and several weeks of waiting. Before going that direction you may want to consider more affordable self-service solutions.
If you have a lot of people who you can ask - the easiest way is to put together a survey at a site like Survey Monkey and ...
3
You will ever face the problem with data quality. Try http://www.google.com/trends where you could compare sites or keywords and see the traffic development depending on your keywords or sites for many years history.
However, you need to take into account, that even the numbers in google might include traffic which was generated just to find keyword ...
3
This is also true for Germany. There's an official service by the Bundesministeriums der Justiz to search for all important information required to be published about companies:
www.unternehmensregister.de (English)
Documents are mostly not free of charge but from what I discovered much cheaper than "2nd-hand unofficial websites" that offering this ...
3
I think it's partly about expectations.. 10 years ago you could throw any old clunky website up and people would accept it if the product/service was ok. Nowadays it's pretty uncommon to meet a design free website, especially for something you might buy, so the bar has been raised.
To my mind, you have to treat MVP as a full commercial release, including:
...
3
As mentioned in this article Groupon has filed for an IPO and in its paperwork has disclosed some revenue figures. Their estimated revenue for 2010 is ~$870 million, but on that they made a loss of $413 million. In this article they talk a bit more about subscriber numbers etc.
If you want some light bed-time reading, then dive into Groupon's actual SEC ...
3
You should take a look at this recent community wiki entry: How Do I Define and Research a Market and Estimate Market Share.
Estimating your revenue and user acquisition rates comes at the tail-end of estimating potential market share. For that, Jarie puts it best when he says:
Defining your marketplace, doing research and estimating market share are ...
3
You can make up numbers based on total market size forever, if your google/apple/microsoft then your look at these numbers because your going to have a chance at a serious percentage of these in the first year ... Unless you have deep pockets or a "facebook" style viral product then you need a different approach.
A realistic method is to work out "playing ...
3
How to tell if your market is large enough?
x = Number of customers you think you can get (be conservative).
y = The price per month you think they will pay (be conservative).
Is (x * y) greater than 4,000?
Now you might notice that x and y are fairly subjective numbers, but that's right, there is no factual answer for you here. Make a guess and move ...
2
As well as figuring out whether there will be a market or not (which you can get an idea of by asking some of your target audience; by creating a prototype and putting it in front of them; putting together some marketing material and getting feedback etc.), you need to figure out:
The size of the potential market. Are there enough people out there who want ...
2
I have been researching CRMs over the last month specifically for order/quote management. I am nontechnical. I looked at SugarCRM, VTiger, Zoho CRM, Salesforce.com, Info@Hand, NetSuite. I am presently using Outlook Business Contact Manager which is not really a CRM. I plan to switch to Zoho CRM (as it is free) and use a SasS platform for order/quotes. ...
2
One way is to compare their traffic. You can use one of the following tools:
Alexa
Compete
QuantCast
2
You can try http://www.zapdata.com/. I think they have a free account that will give you the basics and I am pretty sure they have protections. If not, OutputLogic made an excellent point on extrapolation from past data.
You can also look at the Small Business Administration (http://www.sba.gov/) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/). ...
2
I agree with Ngu. However, it all boils down to the type of business problem you're addressing. If it is a highly collaborative solution that is accessible to many different types of employees, with multiple user profiles and access rights, then web apps tend to be easier to implement and maintain
I'm in the web app development business, and from my ...
2
Desktop apps and web apps are just two different models of technically delivering your software. They both have pros and cons, but there is no way I would say that a desktop app would be looked down on.
Enterprise applications tend to have very rich interfaces that just can't be delivered through a web browser. The clients I'm targeting with my desktop ...
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