marketing, market-research, target-market, pitch, product-market-fitI am working on a startup that is putting together a pitch deck for investors. A part of this is doing a market analysis–identifying competition in the market and analyzing the differences/similarities in our services. I have been using angel.co, crunchbase.com, and pwcmoneytree.com to get lists of companies to look into. However our startup offers services that target a very broad demographic (many different sectors). So I end up with massive lists of companies to research (10,000s). How would you approach this? What are some techniques for identifying companies/startups that offer similar or related services across many industries?
Thank you for your help
EDIT: In response to JCA’s comment, the markets that our products are targeting in particular are: educational productivity software (K-12 and Higher), medical organizational software, business management software.
I would argue that you’re not competing with startups that are offering multiple services across industries but you’re competing with the best players in each of those industries.
What I would do is pick the top 2-4 in each industry and compare them against the respective service.
When we've done market studies we focus on those that we're in direct competition with currently or those players that we'll be competing with when we enter the market. It is extremely difficult if not impossible to conduct market research on all competitors. Our research usually involves the size of the market, the opportunity we see in the market (differentiation), the challenges of the market.
My recommendation is to complete a Competitive Analysis on those market players you'll be competing with directly and communicate your Competitive Advantage. An additional tool is to create a SWAT analysis, however, this may not be descriptive enough in your business plan.
Below are some guides that may be of help to you:
At a micro level, you only want to study the handful of competitors that are actually competing against you. Meaning companies that compete on the same type of unique selling proposition (or whatever you want to call it) that you do. There really aren’t that many that count – you can find them using Google. Upon doing so, study them for real: How do they communicate? On what? How? To what target audience? What sites mention them? etc.? Learn from it.
At a macro level, prefer aggregate types of analysis: size of market, growth, opportunities, trends, macro-behaviors, etc. Think of the latter as a package. For instance, were you to look into starting a fuel-based luxury car business, investors would press you to explain how that fits in an age where ownership of cars by consumers or fuel-based cars are both going the way of the dodo. They wouldn’t care much about how big the car industry currently is or how it’s growing because it’s basically a walking dead.
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