How much sells, to whom and when.
If the solution is free to exploit, the next question is how many units the market absorbs and at what rhythm. Installed capacity, tooling and the working capital you must finance all follow from that figure. Getting it wrong does not delay the project: it sizes it wrongly for good.
Includes pilot runs at point of saleA plant is sized once.
Installed capacity is a decision that is hard to reverse. An oversized line drags depreciation and fixed cost across the entire life of the product; an undersized one turns commercial success into stock-outs and lost customers at exactly the moment the market was available.
The objective of this phase is not an optimistic number, it is a defensible range with its logic exposed: which channel, what volume per point of sale, how often it is replenished and what happens in the weak months. A range with explicit assumptions can be debated in a committee; a bare figure cannot.
What gets measured.
- Market and target buyer
- Definition of the serviceable market and the real buyer profile, separating who decides, who pays and who uses — rarely the same person in an industrial setting.
- Volume and repeat purchase
- Unit numbers, repurchase frequency and expected service life. A consumable and a capital purchase are sized in opposite ways.
- Seasonality
- Distribution of demand across the year, which sets the capacity peak and the stock policy, not just the annual total.
- Pilot run
- Where the product allows it, we test the estimate with a short run in real points of sale. It is the only figure in the phase that is not a projection.
What closes the phase.
- Demand sizing
- An annual demand range per scenario, with the assumptions behind each stated explicitly and kept separate from the calculation.
- Channel map
- Viable routes to market, with the margin each absorbs and its implication for the final price.
- Pilot results
- Rotation and reception data where a point-of-sale test has been run, together with the methodology used.
- Decision record
- Continue to phase 03 with a target capacity, rethink the product or the channel, or stop the project.
Before you commit capacity.
It makes sense once you know you can manufacture and need to decide how much. It also applies when the product exists and a new channel is under consideration, in which neither volume nor margin behaves as it does in the current one. And always before a funding round: an investor discounts a forecast with no method and finances one built on field data.
Your market hypotheses, sales history if the product already exists, and access to channel contacts if you want us to run a pilot.
The boundary of this phase.
This is not a marketing plan or a campaign. The phase produces the figure that production is sized against and return is calculated from; commercial execution is addressed in phase 04, once unit cost is settled and the selling price is defined.
Tell us where the project stands.
A thirty-minute conversation is enough to establish which phase your development enters at and what it would take to close it. We sign the non-disclosure agreement before you describe anything.