startup-business-analyst-market-opportunity

Market Opportunity Analysis Assistant - Startup Market Sizing Tool

Skill Overview

Provides a comprehensive market opportunity analysis for startups and business projects. It calculates the Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Available Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) using both bottom-up and top-down approaches.

Use Cases

Preparing Business Plans and Fundraising Materials

When writing a business plan or presenting to investors, you need to clearly show market size and the opportunity. This skill helps you complete a three-layer market analysis (TAM/SAM/SOM), which is one of the core data points investors care about—especially suitable for startups raising seed to Series A.

New Business Line or Product-Market Evaluation

When a company plans to launch a new product or enter a new market, it needs to assess market capacity and growth potential. This skill offers a structured analysis framework to help decision-makers determine whether the market is large enough and worth investing resources in.

Investor Due Diligence and Competitive Analysis

Investors or analysts need to verify the market size claimed by a startup when evaluating a project. This skill enables you to quickly run an independent market sizing exercise, cross-checking with publicly available data sources to uncover possible overstatements or underestimations.

Core Features

Market Sizing Using Two Methods

Combines bottom-up and top-down methodologies for market calculations. Bottom-up starts from customer segmentation and pricing, aggregating layer by layer to derive market capacity. Top-down starts from macro industry data, validating through filtering by dimensions such as geography and product type. The two methods mutually confirm each other to ensure the credibility of the results.

Guided Interactive Market Research

Collects key information through structured questions: product positioning, target customers, business model, geographic coverage, and more. Then it guides users to select the appropriate calculation framework (different templates for B2B/SaaS, consumer segments, transactional models, etc.) and recommends authoritative data sources (industry reports, public company financial statements, government statistics, and so on). All data must cite its source.

Automatic Generation of a Full Analysis Report

Automatically generates a Markdown report covering nine modules: executive summary, market definition, bottom-up analysis, top-down validation, SAM calculation, SOM forecast, market growth, reasonableness checks, and investment thesis. The report can be exported for easy use in team collaboration and investor discussions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between TAM, SAM, and SOM?

TAM (Total Addressable Market) is the total addressable market—theoretically the largest opportunity available. SAM (Serviceable Available Market) is the serviceable market—specifically reachable within the product’s capabilities and geographic scope. SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) is the obtainable market—i.e., the market share you can realistically capture after considering competition and resource constraints.
For example: for a SaaS tool targeting small and medium-sized businesses in the United States, TAM might be all SMEs worldwide; SAM would be SMEs in the U.S.; SOM would be a 2–5% share of the market over the next 3–5 years that can be converted into customers using the current team and funding.

Where can I get market size data reliably?

Recommended sources, in priority order: first, government publicly available data (e.g., U.S. Census Bureau, BLS); second, authoritative industry reports (e.g., Gartner, Forrester, IDC); third, financial statements from public companies (often disclosed in market size figures within 10-K filings). For niche segments, you can consult reports from industry associations and academic papers, or estimate via a bottom-up approach using customer counts and average transaction value.
This skill guides you to use a WebSearch tool to find these sources, requiring you to cite both the source and the publication date of each data point.

How much is a reasonable SOM estimate?

For early-stage startups, SOM is typically 2–3% of SAM (within three years) or 4–6% of SAM (within five years). This is not a strict rule, but a share above 10% needs a very strong justification. When estimating, consider: competition intensity, team and funding capacity, the degree of product differentiation, and customer acquisition efficiency. This skill provides both conservative and aggressive scenarios to help you deliver forecasts that investors can accept. Most importantly, explain the logic behind your assumptions—not just provide a number.