# Market Entry

Decides whether and how to enter a new market, sizing demand from the bottom up rather...

- Repository: https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount (2554 stars)
- Category: Testing
- License: MIT
- Last updated: 2026-10-18
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill market-entry -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill market-entry -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill market-entry -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill market-entry -g -a gemini-cli -y`
Claude Code plugin marketplace: `/plugin marketplace add cbrock84/headcount`

## Description

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.

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# 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.

## Choose the entry mode against speed, control and reversibility

The rest: https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount/blob/HEAD/plugins/corporate-strategy/skills/market-entry/SKILL.md