market research template

This is the template. No download, no email gate. Copy the markdown below and paste it into Notion, Confluence, or a plain document. Fill it in. Then read the section-by-section commentary below — because a template you do not understand is a template you will misuse in front of a leadership team.

The goal is not to produce an impressive slide. The goal is to make a decision: enter this market or not, build this feature or not, price it this way or another way. Every field in this template exists because someone made a wrong call without it.

The template

Copy everything between the horizontal rules below.

# Market Research: [Product / Feature Name]

**Author:** [Your name]
**Date:** [Date]
**Decision this research informs:** [One sentence — what will you decide once this is complete?]
**Status:** In Progress | Ready for Review | Decision Made

---

## 1. The question this research answers

[One sentence. Not "understand the market" — that is a task, not a question.
Write the specific decision hanging in the air: "Should we enter the SMB HR tech
segment in South India before Series A?" or "Does the market support a Rs 999/month
price point for our compliance tier?"]

---

## 2. Market sizing

### TAM — Total Addressable Market

**Definition:** Revenue opportunity if you had 100% market share.

**Method used:** Top-down | Bottom-up | Triangulated (use at least two)

**Top-down estimate:**
- Source: [Report name, author, date]
- Global/national market size: [Number]
- Your geography filter: [e.g., India only → multiply by 0.07 of global]
- Your segment filter: [e.g., SMBs → 32% of the segment]
- **Adjusted TAM:** [Number]

**Bottom-up estimate:**
- Target customer definition: [Specific — industry, size, role, geography]
- Total number of such customers: [Number + source]
- Percentage with this pain/need: [% + how you derived it]
- Average annual spend per customer (your price × 12): [Number]
- **Bottom-up TAM:** [Target customers × % with need × annual spend]

**Gap check:** [Is the top-down within 5x of bottom-up? If not, which input is wrong?]

---

### SAM — Serviceable Addressable Market

**Definition:** The portion of TAM your product can actually serve today.

**Constraints that shrink TAM to SAM:**
- Geography: [Which states/cities/countries you can serve now]
- Language: [If your product is English-only, exclude vernacular-only segments]
- Product capability: [Features you do not have yet that some TAM customers need]
- Compliance/legal: [Regulations that block certain segments — e.g., RBI, SEBI rules]
- Channel reach: [Which segments you can actually reach given your GTM]

**SAM calculation:**
- TAM filtered by geography: [Number]
- Further filtered by capability: [Number]
- Further filtered by channel: [Number]
- **SAM:** [Final number]

**Sanity check:** SAM should be 10–40% of TAM. If it is above 40%, you are not filtering hard enough.

---

### SOM — Serviceable Obtainable Market

**Definition:** What you can realistically capture in the next 12–18 months.

**Inputs:**
- Current team size and sales capacity: [How many deals can you close per month?]
- Current conversion rate (if known): [% of qualified leads who convert]
- Average sales cycle: [Weeks/months]
- Pipeline: [Number of qualified prospects in pipeline today]

**SOM calculation:**
- Reachable accounts in 12 months (capacity-constrained): [Number]
- Expected win rate: [%]
- Average contract value (annual): [Number]
- **SOM (revenue):** [Reachable accounts × win rate × ACV]
- **SOM (customers):** [Reachable accounts × win rate]

**Connection to plan:** [Does your SOM match your year-1 revenue target? If not, which one needs to change?]

---

## 3. Competitive landscape

### Competitor overview

| Competitor | Target customer | Pricing | Key strength | Key weakness |
|-----------|----------------|---------|-------------|-------------|
| [Name] | [Segment] | [Price/model] | [One thing they do well] | [One thing customers complain about] |
| [Name] | [Segment] | [Price/model] | [One thing they do well] | [One thing customers complain about] |
| [Name] | [Segment] | [Price/model] | [One thing they do well] | [One thing customers complain about] |

### Where customers leave competitors

[This is the most valuable part of competitive analysis. Read 2-star and 3-star reviews on G2, Capterra, or app stores. List the specific complaints that come up 3 or more times.]

- Complaint 1: [Exact quote or paraphrase from reviews] — [Number of mentions]
- Complaint 2: [Exact quote or paraphrase from reviews] — [Number of mentions]
- Complaint 3: [Exact quote or paraphrase from reviews] — [Number of mentions]

**The gap this creates for us:** [One sentence connecting complaints to your differentiation]

### Competitor business model constraints

[What structural limitations prevent each competitor from solving the problems above?]

- [Competitor A]: [e.g., "Funded at $40M, burning on enterprise sales. Cannot profitably serve SMBs under $10K ACV."]
- [Competitor B]: [e.g., "Freemium with 5M users. Any compliance feature that reduces free-tier utility will face internal resistance."]

### Switching cost analysis

| From competitor | Data migration | Retraining | Integration rebuild | Estimated total effort |
|----------------|---------------|------------|-------------------|----------------------|
| [Competitor A] | [High/Med/Low] | [High/Med/Low] | [High/Med/Low] | [Weeks estimate] |
| [Competitor B] | [High/Med/Low] | [High/Med/Low] | [High/Med/Low] | [Weeks estimate] |

**Implication:** [Does switching cost favour us or them? What does this mean for our GTM?]

---

## 4. Customer insight summary

[Do not skip this even if you have done separate user research. Synthesise the 3–5 findings most relevant to this market research question.]

**Pain that is acute (they would pay today):**
- [Finding 1]
- [Finding 2]

**Pain that is latent (they have it but have not named it):**
- [Finding 1]

**What they are currently using as a workaround:**
- [Workaround] → implication for switching cost and urgency

**Willingness to pay signal:**
- [How did you probe this? What did they say?]
- Anchors mentioned: [Price points that came up in conversation]

---

## 5. India-specific context

[Fill this only if your market is India or includes significant Indian segments. Skip if not applicable.]

**Data gaps and proxies used:**
- [Where a reliable report did not exist, what proxy did you use?]
- [e.g., "No SMB SaaS adoption report for Tamil Nadu. Used FSSAI licensing data + Swiggy partner count as proxy."]

**Regulatory considerations:**
- [Any sector-specific regulation: RBI, SEBI, DPIIT, GSTN, etc.]
- [Does the regulation create a compliance burden that is your opportunity, or a barrier to entry for you?]

**Tier-2/Tier-3 relevance:**
- [Is your SAM concentrated in metro cities, or does it extend to Tier 2? What does the data say?]

---

## 6. The one-pager for leadership

[This section is the output — it goes into the deck or the document your stakeholders actually read. Everything above is your working. This is the conclusion.]

**Market opportunity:** [TAM / SAM / SOM in one sentence with numbers]

**Why this is real:** [Two data points that are not Statista reports — bottom-up signals, customer conversations, competitor revenue triangulation]

**Our differentiation:** [What we do that no competitor does well, connected to a real customer complaint]

**The constraint:** [One honest limitation on the opportunity — geography, capability, team capacity]

**The decision this research supports:** [Restate the question from Section 1 and answer it directly: yes/no/conditional]

**What we would need to believe to be wrong:** [One sentence. "This analysis breaks if our assumed conversion rate of 4% is actually under 2%."]

How to fill each section

Section 1: The question

Before you write a single number, write the decision this research serves.

Most PMs skip this and fill in market research sections as a ritual — because a deck needs a TAM slide, because their manager asked for a competitive analysis, because it is what PMs do. This is how you get research that takes three weeks and changes nothing.

The question forces accountability. “Should we expand to the BFSI segment before Q3?” means your research is finished when you can answer yes or no, not when the slide looks polished.

If you cannot write a one-sentence decision, your stakeholder has not told you what they need. Go ask before you start.

Section 2: Market sizing

The discipline here is running both top-down and bottom-up, then explaining the gap.

Top-down is fast. Pull a Statista or Gartner report, apply percentage filters for your geography and segment, and you have a number. It is also nearly useless for product decisions because the report was not written for your specific segment, your price point, or your go-to-market. Use it as a ceiling check — the market cannot be larger than this.

Bottom-up is slower and more honest. You start from your target customer definition and scale up from unit economics. The calculation is:

Number of target customers × percentage who have the pain × annual contract value = TAM

The discipline is being precise about “target customer.” Not “Indian SMBs” — that is 63 million companies. Not “Indian SMBs using SaaS” — that is still millions. “Indian SMBs in regulated industries with 10–200 employees, using digital tools, in states where our sales team operates” — that is a number you can work with.

The gap check is mandatory. If your top-down TAM is $500 million and your bottom-up TAM is $12 million, something is broken. Either the report’s segment definition includes things you cannot sell to, or your bottom-up customer count is too conservative. Finding that gap — and explaining it — is more valuable than either number alone.

On the SAM filter: Every PM I have worked with makes SAM too large. They include segments they plan to serve in three years. They include geographies they have never sold into. They include enterprise buyers when their product has no enterprise features. SAM is not your ambition. SAM is what you can actually serve this quarter with your current product. If you have to write “we would need to build X” to justify including a segment, that segment is not in your SAM.

SOM is your quota, not your aspiration. If your SOM does not connect to your actual sales capacity and pipeline, it is fiction. A five-person sales team with a 60-day sales cycle cannot close 500 accounts in a year. Work the math.

Section 3: Competitive landscape

The most common mistake in competitive analysis is starting with features.

You build a spreadsheet. Rows are competitors, columns are features, cells are checkmarks. You spend two weeks on it. You present it. Nothing changes. The reason nothing changes is that a feature matrix tells you what competitors have built, not why customers choose or leave them.

Start with 2-star and 3-star reviews on G2, Capterra, or the App Store. These are the voices of people who tried a product, found partial value, and left — or stayed reluctantly. Their complaints are not random. When the same complaint appears across 15 reviews, it is a structural product gap, not a one-off bug. That gap is your opportunity.

The business model constraint section is the one PMs skip most. But it is the most durable competitive insight you can find. A feature gap can be closed in a quarter. A business model constraint takes years to unwind. A VC-funded competitor burning capital on enterprise sales has a structural incentive to keep raising prices and minimum contracts. They cannot profitably serve your SMB segment even if they wanted to. That constraint is your moat — but only if you understand it well enough to build around it.

Switching cost is the honest question nobody asks. Your competitor’s product may be worse than yours in five measurable ways. But if switching requires four months of data migration, retraining 200 support agents, and rebuilding three API integrations — you are not competing against their product. You are competing against the inertia of the existing system. The question “what does it take to replace the incumbent?” should be answered before you finalize your GTM, not after you have lost three enterprise deals.

Section 4: Customer insight

This section is a filter, not a research report. Its job is to answer: does the pain we are sizing actually exist in the customers we are counting?

The two distinctions that matter:

Acute vs latent pain. Acute pain is what customers complain about unprompted. They have already named it, they are already looking for solutions, and they will pay on the day you launch if you solve it well enough. Latent pain is real but unnamed — customers experience it but have not framed it as a problem they need to solve. Both are valuable, but acute pain is where you get early revenue. Latent pain is where you build long-term differentiation.

Workarounds are your most important signal. When a customer is using three spreadsheets, a WhatsApp group, and a manual weekly email to manage a workflow that your product could automate — that is acute pain with a high switching cost from inertia (not from a product). The workaround tells you: (1) they have accepted this pain as a cost of doing business, (2) they have no budget line item for your category yet, and (3) your sales job is to make the pain visible, not just the solution attractive.

Willingness to pay. Do not ask “how much would you pay?” directly — customers are anchored by the question and lie to seem reasonable. Instead: “If you were signing a 12-month contract for something like this, what would your budget approval process look like? What is the threshold above which it goes to your CFO?” The process question gets you to real numbers faster than the direct price question.

Section 5: India-specific context

Market research in India has a data problem. Reliable, current, segment-specific reports for Indian markets either do not exist, cost Rs 5 lakh, or were written for audiences in other countries using data proxies that do not apply.

Three approaches that work:

Proxy metrics. Find the closest public data to what you need and adjust. FSSAI licenses issued, DPIIT Udyam registrations, RBI account holder data, GSTN filing counts — these are real numbers from government sources. They are not perfect for your segment, but they are more honest than a Statista estimate built from surveys of US analysts.

Channel-back sizing. If your GTM is Google Search or LinkedIn Ads, your SOM is bounded by the audience size you can actually reach on those channels. Google Keyword Planner gives you monthly search volume for your category terms. LinkedIn Campaign Manager gives you the exact audience size for your ICP by job title, industry, and company size. These are the real ceilings on your reachable market — often smaller than your SAM estimate, and almost always more accurate for planning.

Competitor revenue triangulation. For Indian SaaS companies, you can estimate revenue from three signals: LinkedIn employee count, funding history from Crunchbase or Tracxn, and public pricing. A 150-person SaaS company with a Series B in 2022 and Rs 5,000/month pricing is likely doing Rs 8–15 crore ARR. If three such competitors exist, your served market is at least Rs 25–45 crore. Imprecise, but directionally useful — and more honest than a global report’s India estimate.

Section 6: The one-pager

This is the only section your CPO will read. Everything above is how you arrived here. This is the destination.

The one-pager has a specific structure for a reason. Market opportunity first — the numbers, compressed. Then why this is real — not Statista, but ground-truth signals. Then your differentiation — connected directly to a complaint customers already have, not to a feature you are proud of building. Then the constraint — honest. Then the decision — the answer to the question you wrote in Section 1.

The last line — “what we would need to believe to be wrong” — is the one that builds trust. Every leadership team has been burned by a PM who presented confident market sizing that turned out to be built on one bad assumption. When you name the assumption explicitly, two things happen: you demonstrate intellectual honesty, and you give the team something to test rather than something to distrust. An investor or CPO who reads “this analysis breaks if conversion rate is under 2%” knows you understand your own model. That is worth more than a cleaner number.

Common mistakes when using this template

Filling in numbers without a decision. If you fill in the TAM, SAM, and SOM and then ask “so what should we do?” — the template failed because you failed. Sections 1 and 6 are the anchor points. If you cannot write them, you are not done.

Treating the one-pager as the output and the research as the input. Leadership reads the one-pager. That does not make it the work. If your one-pager says something that the research does not support, someone will find it. Usually in the meeting where it matters most.

Competitive analysis without customer voice. A feature matrix built from competitor websites tells you what is marketed, not what is valued. Before you compare features, read reviews. Every time.

SAM as aspiration. SAM is constrained by your current product and current GTM. If including a segment requires you to build something or hire someone, it does not belong in SAM. Put it in a footnote called “expansion opportunity” and move on.

Skipping the gap check. The gap between top-down and bottom-up is not a problem to hide — it is the most valuable part of the analysis. Explaining the gap shows you understand your market better than anyone who just lifted a number from a report.

Related pages

• Market Research & Sizing — the theory behind TAM/SAM/SOM, top-down vs bottom-up, and competitive analysis that changes decisions
• PRD Template — once the market research is done, this is where product decisions get specified
• Product Strategy & Vision — how market research feeds into a strategy that your team can actually execute
• Pricing Strategy — how to connect your willingness-to-pay signals to a pricing model