SOM, SAM, and TAM Market Sizes:
In order to narrow down our initial product and market size, we pose the following question: How might we enable Bay Area upperclassmen college students with experience in product/design to better highlight their portfolios, interests, and personalities through a standardized, multidimensional, professional platform? Think LinkedIn for young product/design emerging professionals.
Our SOM is Bay Area university students and recent graduates who have a product/design career focus. We calculated the market size by finding the number of Stanford, Berkeley, USF, and Santa Clara upperclassmen college students as of 2022 x percentage of product design majors at each of those schools to equal a rough estimate of the total number of product design upperclassmen college students in the Bay Area.
- Stanford: 7,500 / 2 * 0.05 = about 200 product design upperclassmen (0.05 of Stanford students are product design majors)
- Berkeley: (.05 product design students x 40,000 total students) / 2 = 1,000 product design upperclassmen
- USF: 5,500 total students / 2 * 0.05 = 137
- Santa Clara University: 5,500 total students / 2 x 0.05 = 137
- = About 1,500 total product design upperclassmen college students
- Note: we assume that 5% (0.05) of students at each university in the Bay Area (Berkeley, USF, Santa Clara) study product/design based on the fact that 5% of students at Stanford study product/design
For our SAM, we wanted to target all university upperclassmen and new grads across the US. There are roughly 19 million university students and new graduates (1-2 years out of college) in the U.S.
Finally, for our TAM, our product will be a portfolio, personality-focused LinkedIn for all professionals. Therefore, we aim to have the same market size as LinkedIn, which is about 850 million.
2 Interviews:
The first person I interviewed was a senior at Stanford who uses Fiver, a free-lancing platform, to help her debug her code or work on small engineering-related projects. She would mainly use the platform to hire an engineering freelancer for small, one-time deals that usually took under a few hours and would hire a freelancer on the platform based on their price, the number of ratings they had, and their average rating out of 5 stars. She ended up hiring people outside of the U.S. mostly because they tended to offer much lower prices than engineers in the U.S. on the Fiver platform ($10/hour versus $50+/hour). If she were to hire a freelancer for a larger project, like building a website or a mobile app, she would do more extensive vetting of the potential free-lancer including, looking at their previous experience/projects, looking at their GitHub and actual code they’ve written, as well as doing an introductory call to learn more about the person, their level of skill, and their experiences. She believes that being a free-lancer in the U.S. on Fiver is difficult for things like engineering because free-lancers on the platform from outside the U.S. can offer much lower prices. She also believes that free-lancing at the moment can’t be a sustainable, secure job option on its own and that for now, it is more of an add-on to an existing full-time job (a side-hustle perhaps).
The second person I interviewed was also a senior at Stanford who is an entrepreneur and startup founder. He has hired free-lancers through word of mouth (he’s never gone on free-lancing platforms like Fiver) to do marketing tasks for his startup or to design art for his crypto projects. He was able to vet and communicate with these free-lancers through their social media accounts, including Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. He was able to see their experience-level, examples of past projects they’ve worked on, if they would be a good fit for his specific project all from their social media accounts (basically like LinkedIn, but visual portfolios on social media accounts). He thinks that these platforms are much better and more comprehensive than LinkedIn for being able to market and display your skills, work, and experience. Although he believes that our generation is trending toward poly work (having multiple jobs/working on multiple projects at once), at the moment, he does not believe that freelancing is safe, secure, and substantial enough to completely replace a full-time or part-time job with an employer.
