Market Entry
Decides whether and how to enter a new market, sizing demand from the bottom up rather...
Install
npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill market-entry -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- cbrock84/headcount2.6k
- Category
- Testing
- Updated
- 17d ago
- License
- MIT
- Context cost
- Lightabout 1,097 tokens
- Runs scripts
- No, instructions only
What it does
Decides whether and how to enter a new market, sizing demand from the bottom up rather than from a market report, testing whether your advantage transfers, choosing between organic entry, partnership and acquisition, sequencing the operational and regulatory work that entry actually requires, and setting the criteria that would tell you to stop. Use this to evaluate a new geography, segment or vertical, pressure-test an entry plan, or work out why a launched market never reached scale.
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.
Advantages transfer unevenly. Product capability usually transfers. Brand rarely does across geographies. Distribution and relationships almost never do. Cost structure may invert entirely. An entry justified by "we are strong in the adjacent market" needs to name the specific thing that carries over, and it is usually less than assumed.
Ask why the incumbent has not already done what you plan to do. Either they cannot, which is your advantage, or they have found it does not work, which is your warning.
