B2B Market Analysis: The Developer's Playbook for Hacking Your Business Plan

As developers, we're obsessed with building things. We architect elegant systems, write clean code, and push features that solve complex problems. But here's a hard truth: the most technically brilliant product can fail if it doesn't solve a real-world market need.

Enter B2B market analysis. Before you dismiss this as something for the folks in suits, think of it as the ultimate form of requirements gathering. It's the process of de-risking your project, validating your assumptions, and ensuring you're building a product that companies will actually pay for. This isn't about spreadsheets and buzzwords; it's about applying a systematic, data-driven approach to your business plan—a process any engineer can appreciate.

Deconstructing the Market: A 4-Layer Framework

Forget stuffy business school models. Let's think of market analysis as a 4-layer stack. Each layer builds on the one below it, giving you a complete picture of the landscape your product will operate in.

Layer 1: Industry & Trend Analysis (The Environment Variables)

Before you write a single line of code, you need to understand the environment. What are the macro trends shaping your industry? Are businesses adopting AI, shifting to serverless, or prioritizing data privacy? Understanding these high-level currents is critical.

• What to look for: Market growth rates, technological shifts, regulatory changes, and emerging standards.
• Your toolkit: Gartner Magic Quadrants, Forrester reports, tech news sites (TechCrunch, Stratechery), and even listening to earnings calls from public companies in the space.
• Developer angle: Think of this as setting your environment variables. You wouldn't run your app without them, so don't build your business without understanding the context.

Layer 2: Sizing the Prize (Calculating Your Memory Allocation)

Once you know the landscape, you need to quantify the opportunity. This is where the acronyms TAM, SAM, and SOM come in. Don't let them scare you; it's a simple filtering process.

• Total Addressable Market (TAM): The total global demand for a product or service. (e.g., The entire market for cloud infrastructure).
• Serviceable Available Market (SAM): The segment of the TAM that you can actually reach with your product and sales channels. (e.g., The market for cloud infrastructure for mid-sized US tech companies).
• Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): The portion of the SAM you can realistically capture in the short term. (e.g., The market you can capture in Year 1 with your current team and resources).

Here’s a simple way to conceptualize it in code:

function calculateMarketSize(totalMarketValue, accessibleSegmentPercent, realisticCapturePercent) {
  const TAM = totalMarketValue;
  const SAM = TAM * (accessibleSegmentPercent / 100);
  const SOM = SAM * (realisticCapturePercent / 100);

  return {
    TAM: `$${TAM.toLocaleString()}`,
    SAM: `$${SAM.toLocaleString()}`,
    SOM: `$${SOM.toLocaleString()}`
  };
}

const cloudMarket = calculateMarketSize(250000000000, 20, 5);
// { TAM: '$250,000,000,000', SAM: '$50,000,000,000', SOM: '$2,500,000,000' }
console.log(cloudMarket);

This calculation forces you to be realistic about where you should focus your efforts.

Layer 3: Competitor Analysis (Decompiling the Landscape)

Now for the fun part: reverse-engineering your competition. Who are the other players, and what are they doing? Your goal isn't just to list them, but to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies.

• What to analyze:
  • Product & Features: What do they offer? How does it work? Read their API docs!
  • Pricing & Packaging: How do they charge? Is it per-seat, usage-based, or tiered?
  • Tech Stack: What are they built on? Tools like BuiltWith or Wappalyzer can give you clues.
  • Go-to-Market: How do they get customers? Is it through content, direct sales, or a product-led growth (PLG) motion?

Think of it as building a feature matrix, but for businesses:

const competitorMatrix = {
  "CompetitorA": {
    "pricingModel": "Per-seat",
    "keyFeatures": ["feature1", "feature2", "feature5"],
    "primaryAudience": "Enterprise",
    "techStack": ["React", "Go", "AWS"]
  },
  "CompetitorB": {
    "pricingModel": "Usage-based",
    "keyFeatures": ["feature1", "feature3", "feature4"],
    "primaryAudience": "SMB",
    "techStack": ["Vue", "Python", "GCP"]
  }
};

Layer 4: Customer Segmentation (Defining Your User Object)

Who are you actually building this for? "Everyone" is not an answer. In B2B, you need to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with precision. This is about identifying the specific types of companies that will get the most value from your product and are easiest for you to sell to.

• Firmographics: Industry, company size (revenue/employees), location.
• Technographics: What technologies do they already use? (e.g., Salesforce users, AWS shops, companies with a Kubernetes stack).
• Behavioral: Are they early adopters? Are they actively looking for a solution like yours?

Here’s what an ICP might look like as a JSON object:

const idealCustomerProfile = {
  "profileName": "Mid-Market SaaS Company",
  "firmographics": {
    "industry": "SaaS",
    "employeeCount": {"min": 50, "max": 500},
    "annualRevenue": {"min": 10000000, "max": 100000000}
  },
  "technographics": {
    "crm": "HubSpot",
    "cloudProvider": "AWS",
    "backendLanguage": "Node.js"
  },
  "painPoints": [
    "Scaling customer support is too expensive",
    "Engineering team is bogged down by bug reports",
    "Lack of visibility into user behavior"
  ]
};

This ICP is your north star. It informs your product roadmap, your marketing copy, and your sales strategy.

The B2B Analysis Toolkit: APIs & Automation

As developers, we can automate parts of this research. Instead of manually digging through websites, leverage APIs and scripts.

• Company Data: Use APIs from Clearbit, Crunchbase, or Apollo.io to enrich data on potential customers and competitors.
• Tech Stack Analysis: Use the libraries behind tools like Wappalyzer to programmatically identify competitor tech.
• Web Scraping: Need to analyze competitor pricing pages or feature lists at scale? A simple Puppeteer or Playwright script can be your best friend.

Here's a quick example to scrape headlines from a tech news site:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function getTechHeadlines(url, selector) {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto(url);

  const headlines = await page.evaluate((selector) => {
    const elements = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(selector));
    return elements.map(element => element.innerText);
  }, selector);

  await browser.close();
  return headlines;
}

// Example usage for a news site (selector will vary)
getTechHeadlines('https://techcrunch.com/', 'h2.post-block__title a')
  .then(console.log)
  .catch(console.error);

Build the Right Thing

B2B market analysis isn't a one-time task you check off a list. It’s a continuous process of learning, validating, and iterating—just like software development. By treating it as a core engineering discipline, you drastically increase the odds of not just building something cool, but building something that matters. You move from being a code-writer to being a problem-solver and a true builder.

Originally published at https://getmichaelai.com/blog/the-ultimate-b2b-market-analysis-a-guide-for-your-business-p