Article · 10 min read

How to Estimate Market Size: Business and Marketing Planning for Startups

MaRS Discovery District Free Beginner

A practical guide from a startup accelerator that walks through gathering the data behind both top-down and bottoms-up estimates. It is useful when you need to actually source customer counts and pricing inputs. Use it to make sure the assumptions under your slide come from somewhere real.

  • Good sizing rests on data you can point to, not intuition
  • Bottoms-up estimates force you to find real customer inputs
  • Document your sources so the number holds up under questions
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The question it answers

  1. Investors keep asking for a top-down TAM slide, but I built my number bottoms-up. Which do I show?

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