Finding your market opportunity is an essential step in building a scalable startup.

New products and services won’t succeed unless they add meaningful value to users — and those users are willing to pay for such value. Building a successful company requires understanding of your market: the ecosystem of people and companies experiencing some kind of problem that your offering can help solve.

Your opportunity comes from identifying that problem and positioning yourself to be the solution. Conducting a market opportunity analysis can help:

• startup leaders developing their company’s positioning for a pitch deck;
• product developers working towards product-market fit;
• sales professionals prospecting for new leads and exploring new markets; and
• accelerators, incubators and investors seeking to diversify their portfolio.

What Is Market Opportunity?

Market opportunity is the potential for your business to make money by offering a product or service that fills a need for customers that competitors have not sufficiently addressed.

Once upon a time, brick-and-mortar bookstores such as Barnes and Noble were firmly entrenched as go-to options in their market. Amazon recognized an opportunity (a more convenient, delivery-based option) and seized it. Startups often talk about disrupting their market, and that really just means finding a new opportunity within an existing ecosystem.

There are millions of startups out there. Yours won’t succeed unless you offer something different. For example, you could start a SaaS cybersecurity company, but you’ll likely face major competition. Maybe some market research reveals that sales automation SaaS platforms need a better security offering. Now you can find your niche and take advantage of the opportunity.

How to Find Market Opportunity

York IE Fuel simplifies market research and market opportunity analysis while providing the most up-to-date information for your search.

Most market and competitive intelligence platforms require startups to manually update their market category and other information. Unfortunately, not every company maintains its profile’s accuracy — and startups are constantly pivoting and creating new markets. Analyst firms provide market intelligence, but companies typically have to pay to play to get included in their reports.

Fuel instead uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to learn how a company positions itself and automatically classifies that company within its relevant market. New companies are added and existing ones are reclassified every day. It’s dynamic, real-time market categorization.