Analyse market, sized.
Also called: Market sizing · TAM/SAM/SOM · Opportunity analysis · Addressable market study
Sizing the market from the bottom up, total down to the realistic slice you can win, so the commercial case rests on numbers, not hope.
Size three things: the total market, the slice you can actually serve, and the slice you can realistically win this year. Build it bottom-up from real units and price. Top-down “1% of a huge number” is a fantasy that never survives a first production run.
What analysing the market is
Analysing the market means working out how big the opportunity really is, in units and pounds, and what share of it you can plausibly take. It runs three layers down: the total market (everyone who could conceivably buy a product like yours), the serviceable market (the slice your product, channel and price actually reach), and the obtainable market (the slice you can realistically win against the competition in a defined window). Each layer is smaller than the last, and the gap between them is where most plans quietly fall apart.
The systems point is that these numbers are not a slide for investors. They are an input to every decision downstream. Your obtainable market sets your first production run, which sets your tooling commitment, which sets your unit cost, which sets whether the £149 price even works. Get the slice wrong and the whole chain miscalibrates. I treat market sizing as the dial that the rest of the build is geared to, not a box to tick before moving on.
The two ways to size, and why one of them lies
- Top-down. Start with a giant industry figure (“the UK bakeware market is worth hundreds of millions”) and claim a percentage. It feels rigorous and is almost always nonsense, because the percentage is plucked from the air and the giant figure includes products and buyers you will never reach.
- Bottom-up. Start with real units: how many people fit the persona, how many buy in a year, at what price, through which channel. Multiply up. It is harder, slower, and the only one worth trusting, because every number is one you can defend or correct.
How analysing the market looks done well
Here is the sizing we worked through for the proofing box, built bottom-up so you can see the shape of a defensible answer rather than a generic template. Notice each row carries a number you could argue with, which is the point.
The slice is deliberately modest. Three thousand units is not a rounding error on a giant TAM; it is the number two people can actually build, ship and stand behind, and it threads straight into the first production run.
The same idea, sized two ways. One reassures and tells you nothing; the other constrains the build.
- “The bakeware market is worth a fortune.”
- “We only need 1% of it.”
- “Sourdough is huge right now.”
- No unit count, no channel, no price tied to it.
- Tens of thousands of serious bakers we can reach.
- ~3,000 units winnable in year one through one channel.
- Each unit at £149 on a £38–55 build cost.
- Every number defensible and correctable.
The left column is unfalsifiable, so it cannot drive a single decision. The right column tells you exactly how many units to tool for, which is the only thing the rest of the build cares about.
How it fits the bigger picture
Analyse market is activity 04.10.02 in the framework, the second of eight Evaluate-stage activities. It sits behind the competitor review that frames who you are up against, and it feeds straight into risk assessment (04.10.03), where an undersized or oversized slice becomes one of the biggest risks on the register.
What it can do
It turns a vague sense of “big opportunity” into a defensible unit count, and that count cascades: it sizes the first production run, the tooling spend, the unit cost, and whether the price holds. Done bottom-up, it gives every later stage a number to gear against and an honest answer when someone asks how big this really is.
What it can’t do
It can’t tell you the slice is achievable; only a real sell-through does that. The numbers here are a grounded estimate, not a forecast, and they will move once the market answers back. It also can’t price the product or design the run on its own; it sizes the opportunity and hands those decisions, properly informed, to the stages that follow.
See the full 10-stage process →
Try it yourself
Size your market in three layers, bottom-up. Total: who could conceivably buy this? Serviceable: who can your product, price and channel actually reach? Obtainable: how many can you win and support in year one? Use real numbers at each step. If your only justification is “1% of a big market”, you haven’t sized it yet, you’ve guessed.
Want a structured first pass? Start the Free Sprint → and the GPT will walk you through the opportunity numbers.
Your market-analysis checklist
Project notes: the slice that set the run
▸ From the notebook · optional reading
Talking Dan and Anna Hartley down from a million-pound TAM to a 3,000-unit slice in Stockport, and how that number quietly set the whole first run.
3 min read · click to open
Dan arrived with a slide. UK bakeware was worth a great deal of money, the deck said, and “we only need half a percent.” It is the most natural mistake in the world, and the most dangerous, because half a percent of a huge number still looks like a business while telling you nothing you can act on.
So we worked it the other way round, at the kitchen table in Stockport. Not “what is the market worth”, but “how many people, exactly, will buy this thing, from where, at £149, in the first year?”
Building it up from real people
Total market: every UK home sourdough baker. A big, soft number, and useless on its own, because most of them own a banneton and a tea towel and consider that sufficient. Serviceable market: serious bakers in cold kitchens who already spend on premium kit and could be reached through DTC and the Sourdough School audience. That dropped us to tens of thousands, which already felt more honest.
Obtainable market was the one that mattered. I asked Dan a blunt question: forget the spreadsheet, how many of these can the two of you actually pack, ship and answer emails about in a year, while sourcing ceramic and not losing your minds? The honest answer was a first run of 500 to 1,000, climbing toward maybe 3,000 across year one.
Where the number earned its keep
That 3,000 was not a disappointment. It was the most useful figure in the whole evaluation, because everything downstream geared to it. The first ceramic tooling order was sized for hundreds, not thousands, so the cash outlay stayed survivable. The £149 price had to hold a margin at low volume, which killed any temptation to add cost. And it set a clear bar for whether the obtainable slice was even real.
Anna put it best: “So we’re not chasing the whole market, we’re proving we can win a corner of it.” Exactly. The million-pound TAM went in the appendix where it belonged. The 3,000-unit slice went on the wall, because that was the number the production plan, the tooling spend and the price all answered to.
— Evaluate stage, project notes, 2026
— Next in Evaluate → Risk assessment