I am starting to think that the market analysis included in most business plans is somewhere between magic and pulled from thin air.
There's probably a lot of truth to that, but there are sources of information... you may just have to do some digging. For starters, the big analyst firms (Gartner Group, Forrester, IDC, etc.), do a lot of research on this stuff and publish reports and whitepapers that you can use. They do publish some information for free, but a lot of it is kinda pricey. You can also commission custom research / studies to answer specific questions. The problem is - as you might guess - this stuff isn't necessarily cheap.
Outside of those guys, there is market research you can do using information from the US Census Bureau, various State government agencies, and local / regional trade associations. You may have to extrapolate and make some guesses, but you can probably come up with something that's a little bit better than complete BFM / "pulled from thin air."
is fairly inexpensive and gives some useful - if basic - advice on doing preliminary market research.
Note that there are also smaller market research firms (sometimes as small as one individual) that you can hire to do custom market research. I've never used any of these outfits, so I can't really speak to how expensive or how effective they are. But I know they are out there.
You may also find some useful information by trawling through the "Market Sizing" and/or "Market Research" topics on Quora:
There's probably a lot of truth to that, but there are sources of information... you may just have to do some digging. For starters, the big analyst firms (Gartner Group, Forrester, IDC, etc.), do a lot of research on this stuff and publish reports and whitepapers that you can use. They do publish some information for free, but a lot of it is kinda pricey. You can also commission custom research / studies to answer specific questions. The problem is - as you might guess - this stuff isn't necessarily cheap.
Outside of those guys, there is market research you can do using information from the US Census Bureau, various State government agencies, and local / regional trade associations. You may have to extrapolate and make some guesses, but you can probably come up with something that's a little bit better than complete BFM / "pulled from thin air."
This book:
http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Business-Research-Straight-...
is fairly inexpensive and gives some useful - if basic - advice on doing preliminary market research.
Note that there are also smaller market research firms (sometimes as small as one individual) that you can hire to do custom market research. I've never used any of these outfits, so I can't really speak to how expensive or how effective they are. But I know they are out there.
You may also find some useful information by trawling through the "Market Sizing" and/or "Market Research" topics on Quora:
http://www.quora.com/Market-Sizing
http://www.quora.com/Market-Research