So my boss dropped this on me Friday at 4:45pm. She needs a full competitor analysis and market sizing report by next Monday morning for a board meeting that got moved up. I run a small marketing team of two and our research budget is basically whatever change I find in the couch cushions after we pay for ads. She knows we don't have money for a Nielsen subscription or anything fancy but she still expects real numbers, not just guesses.
I've been doing market research for maybe five years but always at companies with actual tools. Now I'm at a startup that thinks "we'll ask our friends on LinkedIn" is a strategy. I tried using Statista's free tier but the data is either two years old or only covers Europe, and we're US-based. I spent a whole day pulling Census Bureau reports and trade association PDFs but the information is so scattered I can't piece it together into a coherent story. I even tried scraping competitor pricing from their websites manually but half of them hide their prices behind "contact for quote" forms.
The stuff that did work was Google Trends for broad category interest and looking at competitor reviews on G2 and Capterra for feature gaps. But I'm hitting a wall trying to estimate market size. I've read conflicting advice about using TAM SAM SOM formulas from free templates versus just triangulating from publicly traded competitor annual reports. The annual reports route seems impossible because our main competitors are all private.
What I need is a step-by-step method someone has actually used on a shoestring budget that produces defensible numbers. Not theory. Not "just buy a report." A real process that works when your boss needs something yesterday and you have zero money left this quarter. If you've done this before with just free or cheap tools, I'd love to hear exactly what you did and what the output looked like.
I've been doing market research for maybe five years but always at companies with actual tools. Now I'm at a startup that thinks "we'll ask our friends on LinkedIn" is a strategy. I tried using Statista's free tier but the data is either two years old or only covers Europe, and we're US-based. I spent a whole day pulling Census Bureau reports and trade association PDFs but the information is so scattered I can't piece it together into a coherent story. I even tried scraping competitor pricing from their websites manually but half of them hide their prices behind "contact for quote" forms.
The stuff that did work was Google Trends for broad category interest and looking at competitor reviews on G2 and Capterra for feature gaps. But I'm hitting a wall trying to estimate market size. I've read conflicting advice about using TAM SAM SOM formulas from free templates versus just triangulating from publicly traded competitor annual reports. The annual reports route seems impossible because our main competitors are all private.
What I need is a step-by-step method someone has actually used on a shoestring budget that produces defensible numbers. Not theory. Not "just buy a report." A real process that works when your boss needs something yesterday and you have zero money left this quarter. If you've done this before with just free or cheap tools, I'd love to hear exactly what you did and what the output looked like.
