How the Market Functions

This is still part of setting the scene for an investor so can be presented in a manner you think is most appropriate to your specific market. An investor will do their own Due Diligence on a market before considering your product within it, and providing this kind of breakdown helps them know where to look and what to ask, as well as providing some answers. Topics to think about might include:

Type of Market

Some value chains are pipelines, in which upstream suppliers source raw materials, pass them to midstream suppliers who transform them, then on to logistics specialists and finally wholesalers and retailers. If your market is in a pipeline value chain, what kind of stage is it? Logistics markets have certain commonalities regardless of the specific product, for example.

If your market is a platform, then companies operate by providing a forum (platform) in which buyers and sellers can interact with each other. Profitability is driven by the share of each transaction a platform provider can take, and the number of transactions.

Stability

Some markets are inherently cyclical, or just plain unstable. Some are even counter-cyclical. Education, as a publicly funded market, tends to be fairly uncyclical. Budget supermarkets and clothes shops do better during recessions and so are counter-cyclical.

A form of instability will often depend on some external factor, not always macroeconomic conditions. Identify what any instability in your market links to (causation and correlation can be dangerous words). Profitability for airline companies can be strongly affected by oil prices, for example.

Finance

How much money do startups need to enter this market? And among the larger companies, is funding provided by debt or equity? Infrastructure companies tend to receive a lot of debt as they have lots of fixed assets that creditors can take in the case of default, whereas tech companies find it harder to raise debt given the lack of hard assets.

If you are raising a larger amount, you might also want to consider the public/private split of the larger companies in the market. If IPOs are rare for companies in your market, then PE funds and industry competitors have that much more monopsony power when it comes to acquiring you one day.

For all sizes of companies in the market, try to provide an idea of revenue, EBITDA, and profitability. The more your financial forecasts differ from industry norms, the more you are going to have to evidence a very unique resource that cannot be copied in the long run.

Monopoly Power

How big is big? Do any of the market leaders have over 50%? In the US, subject to other conditions, a firm must have over 50% market share to be a monopoly. A market with a few companies each owning more than 10-20% market share is one that is quite heavily dominated by incumbents, and in niche medical sectors this may be the case. Oligopolies indicate barriers to market entry but larger profits once achieved; this is not of itself insurmountable, but a funding plan will need to align with this reality.

Highly competitive markets, meanwhile, are easy to join but tend to have lower profit ratios precisely because of the competition.

Success

A question you will inevitably be asked by an investor is what the common theme for success is within a market. Here you want to determine input features, not outputs. For example, access to industry players, a highly-skilled workforce, and capital are inputs that make Silicon Valley firms successful. The fact that a company is simply in Silicon Valley, from a geographical perspective, does not make it likely to succeed.