We helped Bagan Innovation Technology estimate the Myanmar market size for fortune telling and now we’re sharing how we did that.
It’s a common sight at startup pitch events all over the world (including here in Myanmar): a founder talks about their product and traction and then claims the market size for their product is hundreds of millions (or billions, especially in larger markets). If the entrepreneur can access just a tiny percent of the total market, they can achieve revenues of $2-3m in the next two years, even though revenues today are non-existent. We can’t blame entrepreneurs for this: with a few minutes to impress, they need to use big numbers and we’re always telling entrepreneurs to think big. But things can often fall apart when the entrepreneur is questioned about their assumptions behind the market figures. Market sizing is the process of estimating the total dollar potential of a market. Simply put, how much money is spent in total in your target market? Example: we estimate that the total amount of money spent on fortune telling services in Myanmar is around $200m. You’ve probably heard about TAM, SAM and maybe SOM. These are Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). There’s plenty of definitions for these elsewhere so we’ll skip over them today, just know we’re talking about how to estimate the Total Addressable Market, which is total annual revenues in a market – this is the first number you’ll need before estimating anything else. Top down or Bottom Up There are two approaches to estimating market size: top down and bottom up. Top down approaches start with a big number and – you guessed it – work down. If we know the total amount people spend on grocery shopping, we can make some assumptions about how much people spend on particular products (i.e. 5% of their shopping basket is onions, so the market size for onions is 5% of the grocery shopping market). However, in Myanmar good data points can be hard to come by. What we often do, therefore, is look for a comparison country and work back. In our example, we saw that The Economist (a reputable newspaper) claimed the market for fortune telling in South Korea will soon be $3.7bn. Top Down Now, Korea has a similar size population to Myanmar, but incomes are much higher. Therefore, we want to find a way to apply the Korea results to Myanmar. Here’s how we did it: we worked out how much % of their income Koreans adults spent on fortune telling and applied this to Myanmar adults. The result was that people spend around 0.28% of their annual income on fortune telling. In Myanmar, that’s a $168m market.
Bottom Up
Bottom up approaches start from the smallest number and work up. If we’re talking about onions, we’d find the price of one onion, then estimate how many onions people bought on average each time they shopped, how many times a year they shop, etc. until we got to the total market value for onions. For fortune telling, we did the same: take the average price for fortune telling in Myanmar, how many times would people go to a fortune teller in a year, and how much of the population uses a fortune teller. This approach gives us a total market of $222m.
Which approach to use?
The simple answer is both. But we like bottom up approaches as it shows you’ve thought about the actual occurrences required to build the market size (rather than abstract numbers without much real-life meaning). Taking the time to go through both approaches helps you triangulate your results. In the top down approach, the only assumption we make is that people in Myanmar spend the same share of wallet on fortune telling as people in Korea, but this is a huge and hard to test assumption. In fact, when we do our bottom up approach, we estimate people spend on average around 10,000 MMK ($6.6) which is closer to 0.5% of income (this highlights the abstract nature of top-down approaches). Also in bottom up, we assume 40% of the population uses fortune telling services - this feels right to us based on our market knowledge and is a number we’d happily defend. In our case, as the discrepancy between the top down and bottom up approaches was rather small, we decided to take the average: $194m (hence the “around $200m” at the start of this post). Taking the average lets us not be too bullish and allows us to better defend our estimations. However, as you can see the bottom up approach just makes a lot more sense and is easier to understand. In all likelihood, the fortune telling market in Myanmar is more than $200m. Note: $194m is a huge, huge market for Myanmar. Fortune telling is a fundamental part of culture and something people are already consuming. We would not recommend trying to come up with a number, but instead following these processes to get to a result. Don’t worry, we’ve invested in markets as small as $20m. Yes, large markets are good, but it all depends how much of the market you can take and how fast the market is growing. Our advice is to be honest with yourself (and others) about market size and use this to guide your market strategy. Stuck on market-sizing? Get in touch with us at [email protected] and let us know where you’re up to. We’d be happy to share some ideas! Comments are closed.
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