FIND YOUR PLACE IN THE WORLD

A Market is a Zone of Commerce, wherein parties exchange goods and services for consideration. The consideration is something of equivalent value, like cash. Basically a market is where you buy or sell stuff. It gets interesting when you try to define the boundaries of the market.

1. Is it a geographical?

Your market can be defined by a particular area or region.

2. Is it industry - based?

Your customers can all be part of the same group, like financial services or retailing.

3. Is it internet - based?

In that case, you will be accessing your customers on-line and you will need to build a specific set of tools to reach them.

Market definitions help you get perspective on where your start up fits in. Once you define the boundaries, you can better size up your customer base, match your sales efforts and compare your differentiators to your competitors. You will either have more work to do or not but you will be able to know how big is the overall opportunity, how fast is it growing and who is your competition to name a few of the fundamental questions you should be able to answer.