Market entry

Entry decisions are usually made on the size of the opportunity and lost on the cost of serving it. The market was real; what was underestimated was everything required to operate there.

Size from the bottom up, then check it against the top down

A market report gives you a number that includes companies who will never buy from you. Build the estimate from countable things: how many organizations fit your profile, how many have the problem acutely, what they spend on it today, what share you could plausibly hold in a defined period.

Use a top-down figure only as a sanity check. If bottom-up and top-down differ by an order of magnitude, one of them contains an assumption nobody has stated, and finding it is the most valuable hour in the analysis.

Test whether the advantage actually transfers

The question is not whether the market is attractive — attractive markets are attractive to everyone, including incumbents already there. The question is what you have that wins.