How To: Market Needs, Market size assessment

Your Market Assessment will eventually drive your Marketing Plan, which will feed into your Business Case Assessment and Business Plan.
At the end of your Market Assessment exercise for your new product, you should have a credible handle on each of the Issues listed, and be able to abstract them into your Pitch Deck.
This article will take a top-level look at each Issue. How deep you dive into each item is up to you and and depends on how convincing you need to be to investors and other stakeholders.
1. What business are you really in?
2. Are you in a demand-pull or a technology-push market?
3. Are you in a Linear, Long Tail or Bubble market?
4. Attributes of your End User 
5. How well your product concept aligns with your Target Market 
6. Total world-wide/or country-wide market size and growth projections
7. Projected Weighted Actual Market
8. Projected Market share
9. Projected EBITDA
                                 Leading to your conclusion --- a credible GO or NO-GO?

Issue 1
                                             What Business am I in
The table below might surprise you, and have you rethink your product positioning statements. 

Issue 2
                                     Demand-pull or a Technology-push market
Your market assessment exercise should tell you whether your idea is a Demand-pull, (that's ideally where you want it to be) or if you are in reality Pushing your product into a market where the Need is only, or mostly, in your dreams.  Note that I'm NOT saying to stay away from Product Push, but just that you should understand what you are dealing with. Great to be excited about your idea, but this is the time for you to balance your excitement with some level-headed discovery and assessment of the Need for it. In other words, is the Need that you think you have found one of demand in the market, where you can have some profitable fun, or is your enthusiasm luring you into a product push situation where you will be forever trying to convince customers to buy.
​Issue 3
                                         Your market's characteristic profile

1. Linear, conventional
2. Long tail
3. Bubble

Issue 4
                                              Attributes of your End Users 

• ​Who are they?
• Where are they?
• What do they need?
• How do they make their buying decisions?
• Where do they buy?
• How do you reach them with your marketing and sales messages

Issue 5
                     How well your product concept aligns with your Target Market

• Market is big enough to credibly support your revenue goals
• Credible upside and growth possibilities to support sales growth
• National/worldwide to fuel sales goals
• Features/needs that align with competitive features of the product
• Silos and sub-silos to accommodate product line expansion
• High barriers to competition entry  - IP, Regulatory, Political, trade secrets
• Improved clinical outcome
• Improved access for patients
• Personal Medicine
• Precision Medicine
• Value based
• Efficiency based

Issue 6
​  Know the total world-wide/or your country-wide market size and growth projections. ​No matter your application, there will likely be several credible sources of usage and demand data, that you can apply directly, or extrapolate to create your demand, sales volume and revenue projections. 
The two most commonly available diagnostic codes in the US (CPT and ICD) provide usage data at the granular level.
The AMA's (Current Procedural Terminology) code describe tests, surgeries, and other medical procedures. 
Medicare (CMS)'s ICD Codes are used globally to track health statistics and causes of death.
The many professional societies such as the AMA, ASMBS, provide open source data in presentation friendly chart format.
(As always, be careful to avoid copyright infringement, and to attribute your sources. Noting that even if the information is made available open source, the owner might still require attribution if you use it in print or electronically).

​Doing Surveys and Focus Groups can add valuable data and insights to your projections.

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Issue 7
                                        Projected Weighted Actual Market
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Issue 8
                                                 Your Projected Market Share

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Issue 9
​​                                           Projected EBITDA 

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Next Steps
If, after working through these issues, you decide on a “Cautious GO”, the next logical steps would be to develop a Business Case Assessment that includes Risk evaluation, Regulatory and and other issues. These would support your upcoming discussions with potential investors and partners. 
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If your concept doesn’t provide solutions within your analysis findings, must pivot or it will fail.

If you are new to these concepts, you will notice how quickly the water is getting deeper than the wading pool it started out as - (Actually, it’s not water, it’s alphabet soup – FDA, USPTO, IDE, 510K, IRB, IACUC, and more). Experienced CEO/entrepreneurs will know how quickly a project can turn into an expensive time suck that they don’t have the time or inclination to manage.

So whether you are experienced, or new in this business, now would be a good time to reach out to the experts at BizPush and MedSurgPI for a no-commitment exploratory discussion. Contact us! 

Further reading
There are many publications (on line and hard copy) offering a wealth of data. Fortune Business Insights offers one such:
https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/medical-devices-market-100085.
While reports and publications may contain a vast amount of data that might be only loosely applicable to your project, they can be expensive enough to take a bite out of your seed funds, and still leave you with the necessity to do a lot of footwork and on the ground research.