Market & Competitive Intelligence I TWB_

Market Intelligence for Startups 101

Posted On 27/12/2018 By TWB_ In Leadership, Product Strategy, Strategic Marketing /

Market intelligence can be the difference between success & failure of a startup. Market intelligence is mission critical in that it enables you to understand your competitors, customers, and other business environment factors. Most entrepreneurs do not fully appreciate the importance of market intelligence or approach it as a strategic business function though.

For the most part, entrepreneurs think Market Intelligence is what large companies with their big desks of people churning numbers from a variety of sources including paid reports and open sources. A lot of startups, therefore, rely on gut feel and seat of the pants driving and the VC inputs – to shape and design their products, map out competition and gauge the response of the market they wish to disrupt. But it is not, and it should not be the exclusive preserve of large tech companies.

What does Market Intelligence answer for a startup?

Market intelligence is a good start point to gather evidence for the assumptions of your business. Evidence comes in the form of both qualitative and quantitative information, collected from primary and secondary research that mitigates risk and guides investment. This doesn’t occur only in large companies with a large budget. As an entrepreneur, your investment decisions are even more critical for your success because they may be based on critical cash flows.

What differentiates the custom Market Intelligence TWB_ provides? We focus on creating ‘actionable insights’ married to your strategy rather than more data on your desk.

Market Intelligence can help identify opportunities and monitor market threats. You can create a feedback loop of learning and action involving customers, competition and your marketing action. You can lower the risk of new products or services that you plan to introduce. Some of what you can answer is,

Where, how and who are you going to sell to? That includes geography, pricing models etc.
What kind of business models exists? What is the size of each?
What are your potential and addressable market? What do you substitute and solve?
Are you really disruptive? What are you replacing?
Who are your direct competitors? Do they have a diversiﬁed portfolio? What is your competitive advantage?
How are you going to position yourself? How will you move with market plays
Do you compare product/technology claims?
What are your weaknesses and strengths in capabilities, USP’s, value & quality, financials, cashﬂow, people?
What is the regulatory environment?

TWB_ Market Intelligence synthesis

What is special about TWB_?

In one word ‘insights’ rather than more data. TWB_ does not just produce data points, rather,

Synthesizes research findings & develop insights
Uses a perceptual map to build your brand story
Defines market segmentation and explain its benefits
Conjoint analysis to compute the relative importance of product features
Compare various brands and attributes using a perceptual map
and lastly, bring a full portfolio of strategic branding and marketing content to help execute your plan

Market intelligence is critical and core process and TWB_ is the partner to produce reliable market intelligence that you factor into your strategic decision making. Market intelligence is an essential tool for viewing the marketplace and making investment decisions and TWB_ has been doing that for the largest telecommunication, life sciences, semiconductor and others for years. It is from that experience we know that it does not have to be a captive function, nor does it have to be standard off the shelf reports. Market Intelligence can be custom, agile, incremental to your needs and focused on actionables rather than data given your positioning and growth trajectory.

Rakesh Shukla, TWB_ CEO

Tech Entrepreneur, TEDx speaker & Philanthropist, Rakesh Shukla is a BTech-MBA & CEO of the world leader in communications for technology businesses with a worldwide Fortune 500 customer base. Rakesh is a speaker on Leadership, Strategic Marketing, Strategic Communications, creating world-class bootstrapped Startups & resurgence in business. He lives with 800 rescued dogs, has no work-life balance and will not have it any other way! Rakesh has been featured in 100+ interviews on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, CNN-IBN, NDTV, India’s national dailies etc.

Are you wanting to have real Market Intelligence to help make decisions?

TWB_ makes complex technical and business ideas of technology leaders across the world easily understood by their stakeholders. Over forty Fortune 500 technology majors in Information Technology, Defense & Aerospace, Engineering, Energy & Life Sciences in the US, India, Europe, Taiwan, China & Japan leverage on TWB_
Read How TWB_ Market & Competitive Intelligence is fuelling the explosion of an Indian major into a ₹ 100,000 crore/ $16 Billion behemoth
Call TWB_ Bangalore 96860 59020 | Houston (832)689-6456 | Tel Aviv +972.544.603.612 or mail shift@twb.in
Get more TWB_ insights on the TWB_ Blog | LinkedIn | Medium | SlideShare