Comments on: Pitfalls in Market Sizing (part 6 continued)

By: Pitfalls in Market Sizing (part 6 continued) | CloudAve

Pitfalls in Market Sizing (part 6 continued) | CloudAve — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:10:16 +0000

[...] post: How to talk about the competition.(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table) Posted Under : General Tags startups entrepreneurship vc funding venture capital pitching a [...]

By: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants–at least for an hour! « Ventures

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants–at least for an hour! « Ventures — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:56:19 +0000

[...] Target Market/Market Sizing TUES: Branding/Messaging/PR WED: Social Media Strategy THUR: Development (Prospects List/CRM) FRI: [...]

By: marksuster

marksuster — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:35:55 +0000

OK. I’ll try to watch my typos. It’s just that usually I write after my kids and my wife have gone to sleep, which means I write from 11:00pm – 1:00am. So I’m usually more interested in getting the content out than the perfect spelling. If you notice any typos or misused words by all means please point them out and I’ll happily update. Thank you for your comments.

By: SaraJoy

SaraJoy — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:34:38 +0000

Really helpful information, interesting perspective. Just dipping toes into this world myself, a little inside info is certainly appreciated.
It would help your credibility if you were more careful about proofreading, though. The typos and usage mistakes are distracting.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:21:10 +0000

Thank you Mark. Very helpful. Plus, terrific blog. (I’ve read all of it in the last 24 hours.) Kind regards.

By: marksuster

marksuster — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:58:47 +0000

My 2 cents: you can show data on marketing sizing and your growth rate. You can show 2 models called “base case” and “aggressive case” and your model is built on the base case. Your pitch is: “this is what we believe will happen in the market and we’ve tried to use “realistic” numbers to model. The reality is that we can never predict at this early stage in our business what will happen but we’re know we’re 1) addressing a serious problem that people have, 2) we have differentiated IP and 3) the market size is large.” Something like that. Good luck! P.S. MBA’s are overrated – I wouldn’t sweat that

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:09:46 +0000

I pitched a VC this week using financials based on bottom-up estimates of market size, etc that — I believe — really are VERY conservative. We narrowed an initial market of 22 million U.S. houeholds (with a child 6 or under) down to about 5 million (who we estimated to be better educated and focused on child raising). Then we built our models around the possibility of reaching 1% of that market within 5 years. I picked 1% out of my own little brain; however suprisingly, I never had heard of other people using that percentage so regularly. (Among other things, I’m not a B-school grad.)

When I shipped my latest glorious business plan off to the a kind VC director who asked to take a look at it this week, I did not 1 but 2 of the things you describe as pitfalls above, namely, using the 1% figure and telling him that my financials are conservative.

Did I screw up? I was deathly afraid that he would think I was pulling optimistic numbers out of my rear end, but maybe simply by doing these 2 things that you cite as pitfalls, I have ruined my credibility anyway.

Is the point not to use conservative numbers, or is simply not to point out that you are doing so?