We get asked, somewhat regularly, what our methodology actually is. The fair answer is “the methodology you’d expect from someone who’s seen a thousand pitch decks.” The longer answer is five stages, in this order, with no shortcuts.

Stage 1: Scope

Every engagement starts with a one-page scope statement. Industry, geography, audience for the report (investor / lender / strategic / internal), and the time horizon. This sounds trivial. It isn’t.

A market research report scoped at “global SaaS” is not a useful report, there’s no single audience for whom that scope produces an actionable answer. The scope statement appears in the methodology section of the final document so reviewers can audit what we promised against what we delivered.

The most common scope failure is overshooting. A founder says “I want the global market for X.” We come back with “the report you actually want is North American mid-market X, sized at $1.8B SAM, because every operational decision you make will be at that level.” The smaller scope produces the more useful document. Always.

Stage 2: Sizing

Bottom-up first. Top-down as an anchor. When they disagree, we name the disagreement.

The bottom-up build is operational. Count the units of customer or transaction or asset that map to your business model. Price them at the rate you’d actually charge or capture. Multiply.

24,500 mid-market US SaaS firms (Census + employment data)
   × $28,800 average annual contract (our pricing × typical seat count)
   = $706M addressable SAM

The top-down anchor is the corresponding industry-report number, usually larger. Both appear in the final document. The relationship between them, typically the bottom-up is 30 to 70% of the top-down, gets explained in the methodology section.

What we don’t do: cite a top-down number, divide it by an arbitrary ”% capture” to produce a headline, and call it done. That construction kills more rounds than any other, and we won’t produce it.

Stage 3: Competitive landscape

We name and profile the competitive set, every real competitor that matters in the category. Each gets:

  • Positioning, what they sell, to whom, at what price (when disclosed).
  • Funded status, last round, total raised, last known valuation.
  • Defensibility, network effects, IP, regulatory moats, switching costs.
  • One-line vulnerability, the specific weakness an entrant could exploit.

“Indirect competitors” count. “We replace spreadsheets” is real even if Excel isn’t a company. The competitive section that says “we have no competitors” is the section that loses the round, every time.

Where the category warrants it, funded competitors get the extended treatment: their actual product flow walked through (where we can sign up and try it), their public pricing decoded into per-customer revenue, their reviews aggregated for the recurring complaints. That’s the level of competitive analysis a partner at a top-tier fund will already have done before the meeting. You can’t afford to be the founder who hasn’t.

Stage 4: Customer evidence

Demand signals triangulated from at least three independent sources. We discount any single signal by default, three weak signals pointing the same way beats one strong signal in isolation.

Sources we use:

  • Search volume for category and competitor terms (long-run trend, not just current snapshot)
  • App store rank and download estimates where the category includes consumer apps
  • Job postings at named competitors as a proxy for their internal investment
  • Regulatory filings where applicable (10-Ks, S-1s, prospectuses)
  • Trade press for the category over the past 18 months
  • Primary expert interviews where the demand question requires them, operators in the space, transcribed and synthesized

What we don’t do: cite a Twitter post or a single SaaS-thought-leader Substack as evidence of demand. Those aren’t sources; they’re hot takes. They go in the appendix at most, never the body.

Stage 5: Synthesis

The report’s conclusions get written last, against the evidence collected. We do not start with the thesis the client wants and work backward to evidence for it.

This is the stage where most freelance reports break. A freelancer wants to deliver what the client expects. The professional reporter writes what the evidence supports, then flags the disagreement (if any) with the client’s expectation.

If our synthesis disagrees with your intuition, we flag the disagreement in the executive summary. You can act on the synthesis or override it, but you cannot say you weren’t warned.

What we don’t include

A few things we explicitly don’t put in our reports:

  • Forecasts of individual stock prices, M&A outcomes, or specific deal closures. Not our domain; we’d be guessing.
  • Statistically significant survey data. We do qualitative interviews where the question calls for them. We don’t run statistically significant surveys, that’s a different research category at 10× the cost and timeline.
  • Regulatory legal opinions. We flag the regulation, we don’t interpret it. That stays with a lawyer.
  • Recommendations to invest or not invest. We describe the market; you decide what to do about it.

What this looks like in deliverables

The five stages map to the SKU we ship:

  • Market Research Comprehensive ($550): all five stages, 20 to 25 pages, bottom-up TAM with assumption tables, named competitors mapped by buyer journey, methodology section that survives a partner-level read. Five business days.

It includes the methodology section in the appendix, with sources line by line. The methodology section isn’t the impressive part of the document. It’s the part that makes the impressive parts auditable.

That distinction matters. Investors who audit your work check the methodology. The reports that survive audit are the ones that wrote the methodology section first and let the conclusions follow.

If you remember one thing

The order is: scope first, sizing bottom-up, competition named, evidence triangulated, synthesis last. Each stage constrains the next.

Skipping ahead, writing the synthesis before doing the sizing, naming competitors after writing the executive summary, sizing top-down because the bottom-up was harder, produces the kind of report that reads convincing on a first pass and falls apart in diligence. We won’t ship that report. The five stages, in that order, are the methodology.