An Ideal Market Profile to Start Up in

Every start-up in gist, is an idea extrapolated into a product/service, eventually building a brand/property for the company which can generate sustainable revenues for the company.

This is a very standard and cliched line. Make sure you read behind and beyond the words and not just between them. I learnt 4 key questions to answer there

• Is the idea solving a critical problem or wish of a large enough market?
• How educated is the prospective customer group about the feasibility of your product/service and does it help them overcome the inertia?
• Is the brand or the property that you're building not-so-easily-perishable due to factors external to yourself?
• How big is the revenue pie that you're biting into and how big is your mouth?

 I didn't have answers to them when I was struggling with a small start-up and that because, I hadn't even questioned myself on these lines back then. Now since I know the questions let me try and answer them.

Answers to them lie in selecting <insert the blog post tile here>

• Chose a market which you are a part of or are striving to be part of, so that you know or even better if you have experienced the pain points. For example, a geek is usually a better technology entrepreneur than the CEO of a retail company. Similarly an aspiring author is more suitable to start a publishing services company than a technology enthusiast.
• If you think your child's education is costly, educating a market is going to cost a start-up its fortune. Make sure your prospective consumers know what you want to sell to them. Let them tell you their problems and what they think will solve them. And, Tada! you should have it delivered to them. Period.
• All entrepreneurs are intrinsically control freaks, I consider it good. Along the same lines, make sure your business model is as fool proof to as many external factors. No point bothering about everything in the world out there, but some of the things you should insure against in your business model are, dependency on other businesses, offshoring or outsourcing, expansion plans and more importantly your people resources. Also make sure that the competitive nature of your target market doesn't restrict your business. For example, if you are a vendor to amazon cloud based products then make sure, you cater to rackspace products as well as private cloud infrastructure.
• In my opinion, an ideal market profile is something of current sizing of 25X if its full potential is 100X. If you can plug in at a 25X sized market, by the time it grows to even 50X, your aspirational market share should be atleast 20%. Although this one factor is also about the persoanl comfort zone of an entrepreneur, whether he wants big piece of a small pie or a small piece of a big pie.

Disclaimer:

PV = nRT

 Being a Chemical Engineer by education, I would compare this juggernaut of Ideal Market Profile to something like the Ideal Gas Equation. Although there is nothing called an ideal gas, we all build out models and solutions trying to come tantalizingly close to it. Just like in the equation, for as many variables, there always is that eternal constant R, that in a Start-Up is you, the startupper.