Ignore this data point at your own peril when choosing a target market

This one simple data point is often overlooked by too many b2b startups that are based in India.

I wonder if that happens because of dominant myths that prevail.

Two most common myths:

– you must sell to customers where you live before you can sell to the world

– if you can win in India then you can win anywhere in the world

In practice I have found this to be misleading if not blatantly false.

Most b2b products fall into categories classified by the business function they help improve: HR, CRM, Sales or type of tool.

These categories are tracked by analysts like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC as well as review-based rating providers like G2, Capterra, etc.

For most of these categories data is available in terms of global spend and even regional spend. Some of it requires you to buy the data from market or analyst research agencies but typically some of it is available for free.

Most of these categories show that the market share by spend of US and Canada is 40-60% of the total.

The average spend for India is 5% or lower in most of those categories; sometimes barely 1-2%.

In essence this means that the US market is on average 10 times bigger than that for India.

With this in mind is it time to review which markets you target?