How To Do A Proper Market Analysis For Your Startup

 

Before you even start a business, it's important you spend some time researching the market to understand its ins and outs. This will put you in a position to formulate a proper strategy that ensures your business can survive in a highly competitive environment. A market analysis is also vital to figuring out the best way to serve your customers.

As an aspiring entrepreneur, conducting a proper market analysis might seem daunting. However, it's actually simpler than you might think.

Here's a guide on how you should do a proper market analysis for your startup: 

What's A Market Analysis?

A market analysis is a detailed quantitative and qualitative assessment of the prevailing market conditions in a particular industry. The main objective of the market analysis is to examine the different market dynamics to get the answer to questions such as;

·      Who are your potential customers?

·      How big is your target market?

·      What are your customers’ buying habits?

·      Who's the competition?

·      What are your competitor's strengths and weaknesses?

Answering these questions will give you a much better grasp of the market conditions and your prospective customers. If you need any help, you should visit infinigrow.com or other similar websites to get help from professionals.

How Do You Conduct an Exhaustive Market Analysis?

Conducting a market analysis isn't complicated, but you have to spend some time researching thoroughly. Here are the steps you should follow during this process;

1.  Determine Your Purpose

Start by finding out the real reason for conducting a market analysis. Some of the reasons include creating opportunities, assessing business threats, and minimizing problems. It's crucial you know this right from the start because it helps stay on track the whole time.

You'll need to determine if the market analysis is meant for internal or external purposes. Internal purposes include business operations and improved cash flow while external purposes can be to request a business loan. Knowing the exact purpose is what will decide the amount and research you'll need to do.

2.  Research Your Industry

The next thing you should do is carry out in-depth research of your industry to understand it better and gauge the direction it's heading. You must always do this regardless of whether you're starting a large or small company. A comprehensive market research, will help you identify several essential industry metrics such as;

·      Projected growth rates

·      Prospective customer demographics

·      The market size in various locations

·      The industry's major trends 

You should frequently conduct market research to see whether investing your time and money in the industry is worthwhile. If so, the comprehensive market analysis will also help you identify the competitive advantage you have over your competitors that you can offer to your target market.

3.  Pinpoint Your Target Market

One fact you'll need to accept when starting your business is that your products or services won't appeal to everyone. You shouldn't waste your time and effort trying to convince uninterested parties to buy your products or services. Instead, you need to identify your potential customers. This part of the process is known as target market analysis.

To know your target customers, their expected buying habits, and how many of them are out there, you need to assess factors such as;

1. ·      Gender
2. ·      Age
3. ·      Education level
4. ·      Income
5. ·      Occupation
6. ·      Location
7. ·       Needs and interests

Factoring in all of these will help you design the ideal customer persona. In most cases, you'll have different personas that you should use this to help you pinpoint your typical customer. Once you do this, you'll be able to efficiently and easily cater to the needs of your potential customers.

4.  Research Your Competitors

Your market analysis won't be complete if you don't take time to examine your competitors, and this includes;

1. ·      Their main objectives
2. ·      Their strengths and weaknesses
3. ·      Their market saturation
4. ·      How they differ from you
5. ·      Their marketing strategies

You should also write down a list of your competitors and rank them based on their strengths and weaknesses. You can get most of this information from news and media sources, as well as your competitors’ physical store locations, websites, and social media pages. With all this in mind, you'll know how to differentiate your startup from the rest by filling any gaps left by your competitors.  

5.  Predict Your Market Share

The final step when doing a market analysis is to create a prediction of your prospective market share. This entails determining the percentage of the market you'll have in your control. Using this, you'll be able to figure out your projected revenue, pricing structure, and whether you need to get a business loan.

Takeaway

The goal of market analysis is to know everything possible about the industry you're planning to enter. This might sound somewhat intimidating for first-time entrepreneurs, but it doesn't have to be that way with the help of this guide.    

 

 

Climate Change: Time is Ripe for Revival

The Earth is the only habitable planet in the solar system. Even though 70 percent of the planet is covered with water, it hosts as many as seven billion human beings. Other than homo-sapiens, the planet supports a myriad of flora and fauna species. From polar bears to the lanternfish, the planet has been supporting life unconditionally.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the natural setup of the planet has been challenged consistently. As a result, the disruption of the natural order has occurred. The most devastating factor was the invention of plastic in 1862. It has defaced the planet and made it sick. From aquatic to terrestrial life, the proliferation of plastic products is proving fatal. Oceans are filled, with incoming plastic piling up every day. According to a report, we are producing over 380 million tons of plastic every year. Besides plastic invasion, air pollution (carbon emissions) and several other forms of pollutions are ruining mother earth. This all has resulted in climate change.

From frequent flash floods to wildfires, mother earth seems to have hit the wall. It’s dying. Instead of taking preventive measures to save the planet, the rich are attempting to flee to other planets, such as Mars. One of the spectacular misfortunes of modern times is that the rich, who own industries, pay lip service to the cause. No constructive steps have been taken so far.

I remember an incident when the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, confronted Swedish environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, as she had poked the rich during a speech. It’s plain simple that Mr. Trump did not like her idea of shutting down large-scale factors that have been running for ages and therefore contaminating the environment one way or the other. As a matter of fact, governments across the world would want to tighten environment laws but couldn’t as the rich fund their election campaigns.

“The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say - we will never forgive you.” Greta Thunberg at UN Climate Summit, New York, 23 September 2019

“We showed that we are united and that we, young people, are unstoppable.” Greta Thunberg at UN Youth Climate Summit, New York City, 21 September 2019

The quotes used in this piece were extracted from BBC.

 

SPARX Group Leads Investment in Singapore's IoT Service Provider UnaBiz

Singapore-based IoT service provider UnaBiz has secured $25 million in its Series B round, which was oversubscribed. The round was led by SPARX Group, and saw participation from CDIB, G K Goh and Thaioil.

"Our vision is to accelerate corporate digital transformation with optimised end-to-end solutions which include hardware, software and connectivity. We look forward to growing our team in each area and working with vertical experts to champion a unified Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) world," said Henri Bong, Co-Founder and CEO of UnaBiz. "The IoT industry has become too fragmented and it is our mission to simplify it and eradicate frictions to truly enable massive IoT, from 0G to 5G."

UnaBiz will utilize the fresh funds to develop specific expertise and services that will help its customers reach their energy goals. Pattern-detection based on Artificial Intelligence is the company's key new offering.

"UnaBiz has made tremendous progress in the past year. We are impressed by its rapid and sustained growth, especially how it delivered one of the largest and fastest smart gas metering projects in the region, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. We look forward to partnering with this talented and dynamic team to meet the growing needs of a burgeoning IoT landscape," said Shuhei Abe, President and CEO of SPARX Group.

The IoT service provider has previously raised $10 million in its Series A funding round. The company has been working to establish itself as a recognized, tech-agnostic and delivery-focused IoT service provider.

 

SD Wan Vs VPN - A Quick Guide

To use the internet and make secure connections while doing so, people can use a virtual private network (VPN) or a secure SD Wan. Each of these primarily has the objective of providing a safe method for employees or private citizens to either use the internet more anonymously or to encrypt the data traffic to protect communications. While VPNs are far better known, SD Wan is now becoming something that businesses are considering due to its advantages and distinctive differences to VPN technology and implementation. For this article, we briefly look at both to better appreciate the differences.

What is an SD-Wan?

SD-Wan, which is short for software-defined WAN, provides a network setup intended to provide improved connectivity for users of the network. The idea behind an SD-Wan is that data requests are tracked on a per applications basis and then routed accordingly to their priority. The advantage of this is that all the available bandwidth in an office environment isn’t used by a few active, large downloads or other data-intensive activities where everyone notices that the network is suddenly crawling along.

Priorities and separate policies may be configured for each application when they’re compatible with the SD-Wan. This avoids creating data bottlenecks through network congestion. Another version of an SD-Wan is a secure SD-Wan. This includes additional encryption to make it even safer than the standard version.

What is a VPN?

A VPN is a way to connect between two points on computers, servers, or networks. An encrypted tunnel is created between two points and once the connection is established, data can be transferred between the two. A VPN manages the internet connection and sends all internet traffic through the virtual private network. Using a VPN can allow data to be sent to a secondary location and it appears that the user is using the web from another location. Companies use VPNs for a variety of reasons including remote workers, off-site employees, and others who need to access the company’s network securely.

Are There Different Use Cases for Each?

When thinking about how your business can benefit from SD-WAN, there are various ways to do so. These include providing secure communication for remote workers or avoiding a sudden slowdown in data transfers by prioritizing network traffic. By splitting out data usage between separate applications, priority usage can be given to the most important apps while others can be data restricted to avoid eating too much bandwidth at a critical time.

VPNs are harder to control from this perspective. They’re mainly a single solution for encrypting internet connections to make them more secure. However, they cannot usually manage the data by priority like with an SD-Wan.

Is One Superior to the Other?

An SD-Wan is an excellent solution to better control network data usage, reroute traffic, and still do so securely. For granular control down to the application level, SD-Wan is the better option. VPNs are still useful; however, they encrypt and tunnel all the data together, making it difficult to prioritize effectively. As a result, bottlenecks can occur. VPNs overall are easier to configure though.

While some people will be unfamiliar with SD-Wan compared to VPNs, it’s worth becoming better acquainted. In the corporate world, the former is likely to overtake the latter in the coming years as more companies realize their potential.