Skimming an industry journal, Don sips his coffee. Suddenly, all but frozen, his coffee in his left hand and the periodical in his right he’s transfixed by the article’s abstract.
“…on the low side the marketplace is worth $2 Billion, with easily 30 or 40,000 potential customers.”
“Wow,” said Don. “With a marketplace that big we’re sure to make a fortune.”
Quixotic thinking like this is alluring when reading an analyst or industry news report. “When the numbers are so big,” goes the thinking, “there is surely enough room for us to get in early and make a fortune.” The problem is that often marketplace metrics estimates are based on professional opinions gleaned from limited interviews and surveys, then amplified with optimistic extrapolation and assumptions—how many analysts work.
Analyst opinions are valuable, but they are not the foundational evidence for your go-to-market plans. In fact, a good analyst will tell you that these are their informed insights about the potential of a marketplace, but many other factors will come into play as the marketplace develops.
This article pays homage to Don Quixote, The Ingenious Nobleman of La Mancha, part 2 where Don and Sancho encounter windmills.
“At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.
“Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.”
“Look, your worship,” said Sancho; “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.”
And so it goes in the marketplace of ideas…
this is me