and what features it can offer, the first step of my project journey is to do a Market Analysis in order to greater understand the audience and competition.
This analysis should let me answer the following questions:
Who are my potential users and customers?
What are my users' digital presence habits?
Is there a desire for a ‘link-in-bio’ & landing page tool designed for esports and gaming?
How large is my target market?
How much are customers willing to pay for my product?
Who are my main competitors?
What are my competitors' strengths and weaknesses?
Ultimately, the market analysis should enable me to:
Avoid putting a lot of resources and time into creating a product not needed.
Determine that the need for my product is big enough that some users will pay for it.
User Segmentation
User segmentation is the process of separating users into distinct groups, or segments, based on shared characteristics. I can easily distinct different groups of users for a digital tool targeting the gaming & esports industry:
Teams
Players
Streamers
Organizers
Referees (thanks Gravity for the feedback and idea!)
Game publishers
Each group has different business objectives, marketing and social strategies. Right now, I don’t know if my product can address the needs of all these groups, or I will have to focus specifically on one. This market analysis should also help me to answer this question, but I already excluded organizers and game publishers. Game publishers because I know how difficult it is to reach and convert them. I don’t want to target them first. Organizers because I spent the last years building a product for them, so I already have a clear vision of their situation. I focused my research on team, player and streamer, the biggest targets.
No two users are exactly alike, but more segmentation of these groups can be done with:
Demographic: their age, language preferences
Geographic: their location
Game played: FPS, MOBA, Team vs Team or 1vs1
Platform / device: desktop, console (Xbox, PS5...) or mobile
Skill & Popularity: pro or amateur team. Famous streamer or not so popular one
Role: social manager, CEO, designer, team captain, head admin...
Popularity is the first criteria of this list I wanted to explore. I reviewed potential users depending on it, in my Market Overview.
Market Overview
The aim of the market overview is to provide a current snapshot of the industry in order to better understand it. Do teams, players and gaming influencers have a website? Do they use a ‘link-in-bio’ tool? What are the links in their profiles on social media?
I created a dedicated page for the market overview. I reviewed dozens of teams, players and streamers. I added my thoughts after each segment of potential users in the Market Overview page:
Then, I did a competitive analysis to continue my market analysis in order to help me answer the questions I mentioned above.
Competitive Analysis
After having a good idea of the current situation of the market, I continued with the Competitive Analysis. The competitive analysis is the process of identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to your own business, product, or service.
I found many ‘link-in-bio’ solutions, in particular on a specific vertical: music. I also tried to list indirect competitors like website builders and social gaming platforms. You can check the Competitive Analysis page for more information:
Lots of data to ingest. For now I’m stopping the Competitive Analysis here. I will go back to it when I will dive in more details on some specific subjects (pricing of my solution, UX of the dashboard, and so on).
Conclusions
Streamers out...
After the Market Overview and Competitive Analysis, I can refine my targets and the user segmentation. I will focus my project on teams and players. Streamers are a huge market with a lot of professional ones, but I don’t see how to attract them, what value to offer to differentiate my product to the many available ‘link-in-bio’ tools, or even Twitch used as a homepage.
And many questions answered
Back to my list of questions, introduced at the beginning of this Market Analysis, I can strike out the ones I can now answer, thanks to the User Segmentation, the Market Overview and the Competitive Analysis:
Who are my potential users and customers?
What are my users' digital presence habits?
Is there a desire for a ‘link-in-bio’ & landing page tool designed for esports and gaming?
How large is my target market?
How much are customers willing to pay for my product?
Who are my main competitors?
What are my competitors' strengths and weaknesses? (ok I can do a better job on the precise strengths and weaknesses of my competitors)
For the size of the market, of course it’s a really important question but it’s easy to answer. Do I need to link you (buzz) articles about gaming and esports? I think we can easily agree that the market is quite huge with hundreds of millions of players. For the number of teams, in 2009 I created a website builder for esports teams and clans. I had 80,000+ websites created. Now there are many more esports games (team based) with an active community, and many more gaming and tournament platforms. The number of teams increased a lot for sure!
Finally, I need to answer the two latest specific questions. They will be key to decide if my project has some potential or not, and so the rest of the story:
Is there a desire for a ‘link-in-bio’ & landing page tool designed for esports and gaming?
How much are customers willing to pay for my product (and how many customers can I expect)?
To do that, I will do User Research, I will interview potential users. But before, I want to have a more precise vision of my project and product to show them more exactly what I have in mind. So the next steps are to define and write my product strategy: the vision, the product features, the unique selling proposition, and also thinking about my branding: the name and visual identity in order to start communicating more efficiently.
Update: I did these tasks, you can now read more about my: