My Growing Understanding of Markets

I was recently introduced to the concept of “markets” in my Creative Founders class, and while I knew the term was important, I had a hard time grasping it’s value. I have been studying interaction design where everything is user centered, and all about what the human wanted, so the word “market” sounded so cold and business-like. I understood market as being a term defined by outrageous numbers pulled out of the air to shmooze investors; but then I learned the process of picking a market, and defining one, and those thoughts dispersed.

Yes, presenting a successful market is a numbers game, but behind those numbers are people. In other words, these markets are made up of the people that I have become so invested in throughout my study at CCA. Also, being able to come up with solutions to peoples problems are one thing, but often times to truly have impact, you have got to have funding — So my team and I needed to define possible markets we could go into.

First off, we needed to pick a topic that we as individuals were obsessed with and figure out where the overlaps were. Luckily, our team is comprised of people who are all interested in the same topic — mental health and well-being.

Next, we needed to evaluate whether or not people in this market were accessible to us for interview purposes.

Then, we needed to delve deep into the secondary research. We needed to figure out if this is a viable market. Gathering this information required a trip to the Haas Library, and hopes for the aid of a research librarian. While we weren’t able to receive the help of the librarian, we were able to sift through and find data on market sizing in the realm of mental health (thanks Julian Crespo). The data was thorough, overwhelmingly so, and it was tough to draw connections between the numbers and our own ideas. The big picture shone through though, and we were able to see that there was, indeed, a market here, and that growth was and continues to be exponential.

Now, we just needed the real stories, we needed the people hiding behind these numbers. So we conducted a quick round of primary research, and interviewed two people who are diagnosed with mental health disorders. These two people helped us fall deeper in love with our problem space, helped us develop our SOM, and also introduced us to the population that would make up our SAM (more on SOM|SAM|TAM).

Yuan Gao organizing team ideas on who makes up SAM.

While we learned a lot — especially on what SOM, SAM, and TAM mean to us — we need improvements on presenting these discoveries. Moving forward, our team could use more practice in presenting dense data in a more concise way so that we could move onto what is more interesting, like interview stories, and our problem area. We now know the value of our market, now, our job is to allow others to understand where we could go with it.