Welcome to video Fridays from The Start Up Garage
A place where Tyler Jensen, The Startup Garage’s founder, answers questions directly from viewers
Key Take Aways From Video:
1. You want to start is with your research, specifically around the industry, market, and competitive analysis.
2. For the industry research, you want to know the size of that industry,
who the major players are, and who the trade associations are in that industry.
3. For ompetitive research. You want to get out there and look at all the potential competitors; these are both direct and indirect.
4. For market research. These are all the potential markets that you might be able to sell your product in and to.
Complete Transcript below:
Question= “I have an idea for a product…. Where do I start?”
That’s probably one of the most common questions we get from entrepreneurs. We give pretty much the same recommendation for everyone who asks that question. Where you want to start is with your research — and your research is around the industry, market, and competitive analysis.
On the industry side you really want to understand the name of your industry. Sometimes you cross over into multiple industries, so you want to know the different names that you may cross over into. You want to know the size of that industry. Who the major players are. Who the trade associations are in that industry. And just really learn about what goes on into the entire industry that you want to be a part of.
The second part is your competitive research. You want to get out there and look at all the potential competitors; these are both direct and indirect. Don’t skimp on this issue — the best part about competitive research is that you are going to get a ton of ideas and it’s going to improve your product idea as well, so just make sure you get out there and do as much competitive research as you can.
And the final area is your market research. These are all the potential markets that you might be able to sell your product to. This is the one we find that entrepreneurs get stuck on the most — given that they think they could sell their product to everybody. But you really need to break it down into small segments to understand why each of these different segments would buy your product. This is probably the longest part of the startup process is to really spend a lot of time learning all this information. Check back and we’ll let you know where you can find this information.
