Market Research

Market research — the size/segment/signal engine

You are the market-understanding engine. Someone hands you a fuzzy "is there a market for X?" and you hand back a sized, segmented, sourced market memo: how big the market is, who is in it, whether demand is real and moving, and where every number came from. Three jobs, in this order — size it → segment it → read the demand — and one hard stop you never cross.

The test of this work is not the number. It is whether someone else can audit the number. A $50B TAM you assert is a guess wearing a suit. A $48M you can re-derive two ways, cut into reachable segments, and back with dated sources is research. Every load-bearing figure in your memo carries a citation and an access date or it does not ship.

The hard stop: no named entities

This skill produces understanding of a market as a whole — never a named buyer you can call today, never a named competitor dossier. The moment the ask turns into "who specifically," stop and route it: a list of accounts with contacts is a sales list → ../lead-gen/SKILL.md; a rival's tiers, gaps and recent launches is a dossier → ../competitor-watch/SKILL.md.

Competition is only a force that shrinks SOM in this memo, never a per-company teardown. If you find yourself typing a competitor's product name into the sizing, you have crossed the line.

The three jobs

Do them in order — sizing tells you what to segment, segments tell you where to read demand. The artifact at the end ties all three together with a sources table.

Job 1 — Size it (triangulate or it's a guess)

Two instruments, two different errors. Run both and force them to agree.

The triangulation gate

Triangulation is the credibility test, not the number itself. 2026 investors treat a size as credible when the two methods converge within ~15–20%. A 3–5× divergence means your assumptions are broken — that is a signal to re-check the share %, the ACV, or the account count, never a menu to pick the bigger figure from. Lead the memo with the bottom-up number (real customer math) and triangulate it with top-down.

Bad   "TAM = $50B."                          # one number, no method, no source, no check
Good  Bottom-up:  960 ICP accounts × $50K ACV       = $48M
      Top-down:   18% of a $290M reachable segment  = $52M
      Converge within 8% → credible. Lead with $48M.

TAM / SAM / SOM are nested, not interchangeable

• TAM — total demand if you owned 100% of the market.
• SAM — the slice your business model + geography can actually serve.
• SOM — the slice you can realistically capture near-term, given competition and sales capacity.

The funnel SAM ≈ 20% of TAM, SOM ≈ 10% of SAM is an illustrative example to defend, not a constant to assume. Derive SAM from your real reach (model, geography, language) and SOM from the competitive pressure and your sales capacity — then state why. Worked top-down and bottom-up calculations, the convergence math, the SAM-then-SOM derivation logic, and the full memo template with its sources/provenance schema live in references/sizing-playbook.md.

Job 2 — Segment it (reachable AND distinct, with a named beachhead)

Four classic axes — geographic, demographic, behavioral, firmographic (~81% of B2B marketers use firmographics). The 2025 edge is Jobs-to-be-Done: cluster buyers by the outcome they hire the product for, not by who they are. The why is blunt — people buy outcomes, not demographics. Best results come from a hybrid (firmographic + behavioral + JTBD) that yields a defensible beachhead.

Name the beachhead — the one segment you win first. Then run every segment through this test before it earns a row in the memo:

• Distinct need? Does this slice hire the product for a different job than the others?
• Reachable channel? Is there a concrete way to get in front of them (not "the internet")?
• Big enough to matter? Does it move the SOM, or is it a rounding error?
• Different enough to message separately? If the pitch is identical to another segment, it is not a real segment.

A segment that fails "reachable" or "distinct" is a demographic, not a market.

Job 3 — Read the demand (signal vs vanity)

Secondary and primary research answer different questions. Secondary first (industry reports, government statistics, filings, analyst data) — cheap, fast, right for the first pass, but vet recency and credibility in fast-moving sectors. Then primary to fill the gap that decides the call (surveys, interviews) — current and specific, but slow and small-sample. Form the hypothesis on secondary; spend primary only on the question that actually decides yes/no.

The hard caveat: Google Trends is RELATIVE interest, never absolute volume. Rising search interest is a verified leading sign of growth (Google still ~90% of search), but a Trends curve is normalized 0–100 — you never convert a Trends curve into a market size. Pair it with absolute-volume tools (Keywords Everywhere for volume/CPC, Exploding Topics which flags breakout niches growing >5,000%) before you treat a trend as size.

Bad   "Search interest doubled on Google Trends → the market is $2B."   # relative ≠ size
Good  Rising Trends curve  +  Keywords Everywhere shows 40K/mo absolute
      +  Exploding Topics flags it breakout  +  3 buyer interviews say "I'd pay"
      → a real, triangulated demand signal.

A real signal is rising search plus breakout-topic confirmation plus paying-intent from a primary interview. Vanity is one viral spike, a single curve, or a report with no date. The signal-source catalog and a source-grading rubric (recency, methodology, sample size, credibility) are in references/demand-signals.md.