Identifying market opportunities to grow your business 🔍

In Episode 5 of Season 1, Sidhant Gupta goes through his journey building Clearbot, a marine, self-navigating bot that uses AI-vision to clear and sort waste from the waters of our planet.

Sidhant explains how they explored market opportunities, particularly in Hong Kong, to further develop the self-navigating bot and sustain the team. As a company that focuses on impact rather than profit, they found that the Hong Kong government funds such projects well, which helped direct their business decisions moving forward, and have so far been successful in doing so!

Whether it’s finding ways to stand out from your competition, or to grow and boost your business, identifying market opportunities from time to time can present you with many other ways to scale and expand your business.

🔍 How to find market opportunities

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📑 Conduct effective market research

This would have to be first and foremost. It’s something that can already present your business with opportunities you haven’t found yet! Have a look at exactly how big your market is, if it’s growing, what’s trending within the market, the tightness of your competition locally or product-wise - and keep track of it.

Use this to direct your promotional strategy to see if you can tweak your messaging and interest more users into your business/product. Aim to execute actions that can scale your business!

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🌎 Explore international markets

Think you’ve covered enough of the ground locally, and/or are planning to test out different markets? It might be time to explore foreign markets! Be sure to check out their economy and the legal responsibilities you’d need to take on. But whatever reason it may be, going global brings a lot of advantages:

• More investment reach - you can attract investors who are based or focused on other areas geographically.
• Increased revenue - hitting more markets mean more users!
• New talents - hiring in other countries could shed light on potential you can leverage for the development of your business.
• Diversification of products - although this isn’t applied to all products, bringing them out to another market may mean a few changes to your product or a new product completely. Test them out and see how the market reacts!

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💬 Converse with users you already have, and users you’ve lost

When it comes to innovating your product, or finding ways to improve it, your best source of feedback and insight will always be your users - the ones who want to use your product to solve their pain points! Find out their experiences with your product, and see what other services or products they also benefit from or use.

Make sure to also leverage the users you’ve lost. They initially came to you with the same pain points, but chose to go with other services or products. So what made them choose otherwise? What could you do or add to encourage them to switch?

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👀 Peek at your competitors

Even if you highly believe in the uniqueness and effectiveness of your product - to a point you don’t think any competitor would even match up, you still always need to stay updated on what your closest competitors are up to!

Consumers, or even your users, don’t only see your product - they are fed with many different promotions of similar products too, even more so over social media.

So evaluate what your competitors are doing, keep an eye on their products and features they roll out, and see how consumers react to them. Having this knowledge lets you know whether you’d have an advantage over them, or whether you need to step it up.

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🐣 Stay on top of social evolutions

So much can change quickly nowadays - in trends and society in general: from Meta introducing the metaverse, consumers being more aware of their action to reduce carbon footprint, to TikTok being one of the most used social media apps.

It’s important to stay informed about these changes to anticipate how it can impact your user’s needs and their purchasing patterns, or how you can leverage them for your business/product.

There are many ways of identifying market opportunities, including conducting effective market research, exploring foreign markers, conversing with your users, peeking at your competitors and staying on top of social evolutions. But all in all, you can be as creative as you can in finding ways to grow and boost your business - you just wouldn’t know until you try and do. Focus on trial and error!

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💥 Bonus:

Sidhant’s top tips for entrepreneurs

⛳️ Start. Ideas and all are great, but start - make it real.
🛠 Ship. You won’t know how to improve your product and develop on it if you don’t ship.
👀 See. Focus on your vision and where you want to be.

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🎧 Listen now on your favorite podcast channels

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Other channels

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