The Detective Approach

The Detective

Put on a detective hat to learn about a community that interests you.

 

The two things detectives do first: look around and ask questions. Entrepreneurs tempted to dive right in may sometimes benefit from the detective’s perspective.

 

Before investing days, weeks, months or years of your life to a new venture, gather as much data as you can about the market landscape. That means reviewing published research, surveys and data reports. Sometimes it means gathering data by conducting surveys or collecting it from experts. The more you know about the market you’re interested in, the more likely you’ll understand where there are gaps and opportunities. Market research also helps in identifying potential partners. Entrepreneurs need the help of partners in each of the primary phases of development, from learning, launching, and growing, to earning, managing and exiting. No one can do all of that alone.

 

After delving into your landscape analysis, you should be able to answer questions in the following three core areas:

People

• How many people are in this market?

• What are their geographic, demographic, and/or psychographic characteristics? [i.e. Where do they live, what is their age/gender/ethnic background, and what are the kinds of activities or interests that are disproportionately popular among this particular group?

• How much do people in this market earn, and how much do they spend on media products and services?

Players

• What media products and services, including apps and social media services, are disproportionately popular in this market to address people’s information, news and entertainment needs?

• What other media organizations focus on serving this market?

• How big are the existing players, in terms of how many people they serve, how much money they make, or how many products and services they provide?

Stakeholders

• To what extent do foundations, nonprofits, universities or other stakeholders devote resources to serving this community?

• What are the objectives of those stakeholders?

• Who are the key decision-makers and what are their sources of information?   

Opportunity Analysis

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the existing players, and how do they position themselves in the market? What products and services do NOT seem to be available for those in the market you’re researching? How much do advertisers spend to reach consumers in this marketplace?

 

If you want to boil that down to its core, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What’s the size of this market, in terms of the number of people and/or the amount of money spent on related products and services?

2. What are the primary existing media offerings that are serving the community?

3. What stakeholders have an interest in this community?

4. What products and services do NOT seem to be available for this market, and to what extent does data demonstrate that there might be demand for those products and services?

 

If there’s no data readily available to answer those four questions, the successful entrepreneurial detective will identify a few experts who can help provide some estimates or expert analysis. Experts are often eager to share their knowledge and their email addresses are often easily accessible. Like Sherlock Holmes picking through data points to understand criminal patterns, the entrepreneurial journalist scours through research to identify noteworthy developments. Where that data isn’t available, you can develop it with the help of surveys, experts and other research resources.

 

Move beyond general market data to focus your detective work on data that’s relevant to the community you’re focused on. Global stats about mobile usage may be less relevant for you than information about how people in your particular community use their mobile devices. And information about overall ad spending trends are useful for global context, but less useful when you’re eventually deciding where to concentrate your revenue generation efforts, a subject we’ll get to in a future chapter.

Next on this map, you’ll find a wide range of perspectives you can adopt to open your eyes to market gaps and opportunities. The approaches are not mutually exclusive, and it won’t make sense to use every tactic each time. Think of these as tools in a toolkit. Once you’re familiar with their benefits and how they work, you’ll increasingly see opportunities to put them into practice.

 

How to Put This Into Practice

Spend 10 minutes thinking about 10 data-related research questions you’re curious about. For example, you may wonder how many Virtual Reality headsets have been purchased in the past 12 months? Or how many average daily questions people ask Alexa? Answers to these questions can provide insight into consumer behavior. Ultimately, they can give you a clue about the extent to which a community may hunger for information, whether about virtual reality, Alexa, or anything else.

 

You may wonder about the number of refugees settling in a particular region. Knowing that figure might provide some insight into whether new news resources might be needed for that population. Answers to these kinds of research questions won’t necessarily lead to clear-cut answers about whether a problem or opportunity exists, but they may suggest whether it’s worth doing some further exploration. Some of your research will address standard questions, like the number of people in a particular market, or the number of existing players serving that market already. Other research will involve questions particular to your interest area, whether that’s Virtual Reality, news services for the elderly, or refugee media consumption habits.