Entrepreneurship is an endless search for opportunity. Opportunities often arise from a boredom, need, or problem. When the entrepreneur encounters this problem, he sets out as a hero who challenges the problem and aims to solve this problem not only for himself but for the whole humanity. In addition, methods such as personal curiosity, passion, wish, desire to reach the ideal or following trends also enable to discover and chase opportunities. In fact, this is the most exciting part of entrepreneurship. The person who discovers the opportunity and its attractiveness starts with great enthusiasm right from the start. However, as he gets into it, he realizes that everything is not as easy as it seems and realizes that many of his assumptions are wrong and must change. This time period is also referred to as the valley of death, as stated in Chapter 1 on page 21.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs who do not realize these or realize but cannot solve them bid farewell to their enterprise or entrepreneurship before they can leave the valley of death. This rate is well above 50%. So few attempts can cross the valley of death. Some ventures can escape from the valley without ever visiting, while others can get out of it by taking a quick look. Undoubtedly, the most important way to do this is to know what will happen in the entrepreneurial journey and to prepare accordingly. In this way, the most important assistant of the entrepreneur will be fast learning skills. Learning fast can only be possible with quick experiments. The entrepreneur should live the scenarios that are likely to live in six months, a year later, as if they are real, and should see the business environment he plans to enter as a controlled experiment area and carry out his research accordingly. While some of these researches can be done at the desk, some of them require being outside of the building in real life.

2.1. Target Market size and attractiveness

Probably, one of the most difficult areas for entrepreneurs is to define the target audience and the market. Approaches like “I target everyone with this initiative” are very far from marketing and strategic management. Instead, it would be a useful start to think of the target market in three separate groups. These can be expressed as Total Available Market (TMP), Accessible Available Market (EMP) and First Target Market (IRP) as shown in the figure. (Figure 3.1). Total available market refers to the largest possible universe of the target audience. Accordingly, the universe (total available market) of an entrepreneur who wants to develop services for hotels in Istanbul will be as much as the number of hotels in Istanbul. Or, the total current market of a company that produces bags and shoes for women will be as much as the total number of women who have access to such products. On the other hand, when we look at the reality, even if everything goes well and there is endless resource use, it is impossible to reach the total available market. There is a limit to the audience that the entrepreneur can reach with his own efforts. This situation is related to the fact that none of the firms competing in the same market (except monopoly ones) dominate the whole market and can only access a certain part of the market. The Accessible Available market is the name of the target audience that the firm can reach with its resources. According to the data of the Istanbul Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, as of 2017, there are 535 accommodation facilities with operating licenses in Istanbul. However, if the entrepreneur thinks that only four-star hotels and boutique facilities will use his product, this figure drops to 247. However, not all hotels will purchase this service regardless. Because some of them are international chains that will make purchases from abroad, some will not be interested in a new solution, some will have management problems, etc. reasons will arise. With an optimistic assumption, only half of these hotels will be eligible for service. In this case, for the example given, the Accessible Available Market will consist of approximately 120 hotels. This figure represents the segment that is likely to become a customer in the next few years. A very important question remains. Who will be the first customer? The main target market for starters is this first customer group.

One of the first examples that come to mind when it comes to entrepreneurship in Turkey is undoubtedly "Yemeksepeti", which holds the title of being the Turkey's most successful Internet venture and was purchased by Germany-based Delivery Hero for $ 589 million in 2014.  Nevzat Aydın and Melih Ödemiş, who founded Yemeksepeti in 2001, the first years of the Internet, believed that there should be an easier way to order food at home. People who ordered by phone had to ask for the menu on the phone, there were misunderstandings about the order, while a person in the restaurants could not take care of the business in the restaurant because they took the order by phone. Yemeksepeti, which carries the telephone order business to the web, has emerged to make this work more efficient and make a difference. Yemeksepeti has become a company that handles more than two hundred thousand food orders daily, not only in every city of Turkey, but also with international operations. With Yemeksepeti, users can access thousands of restaurants, view prices, comment on restaurants, get ideas, and also order food at home without paying an extra fee. In return for all these, Yemeksepeti demands a certain commission from restaurants. Well, if we go back to 2001 and were in place of Nevzat and Melih, who intended to realize the Yemeksepeti idea for the first time, how would we define the target audience? When I discuss this case in the classroom, the answers I get refer to an 18-35 year-old student and white-collar audience with Internet access. So which one of the target audience definitions does this definition correspond to? How can this recipe help Yemeksepeti reach the first customers and understand the market size?

Considering that Yemeksepeti first appeared around Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, we can say that the first customers and the first contracted restaurants should be in this region. So what else can we say about the target audience? It is possible that there are people who see cooking as a hassle, want to save time, want to taste different flavors, but want to eat at home instead of going to the restaurant. In fact, most likely the target audience should already be those who order home food. Since there is no such service on the internet, these people must be ordering by phone. Also, to get started quickly in restaurants, hiring restaurants that already deliver and provide courier services can provide a quick start. It is also possible to assume that there is a mass that will order food online if it is actually a suitable solution, but since there is no solution that convinces them yet, there is a mass that does not order food at home and waits for the right service. In this case, we can summarize the market definitions for Yemeksepeti as in Figure 3.2.

With this distinction, it is possible to answer several questions at the same time. The total available market is important in that it gives the largest target audience that can ideally be reached. Investors in particular look at this data when calculating the market size to see how far a business can go. However, describing the total available market in terms of getting the business to life doesn't say much for the inception phase. In the Yemeksepeti example, we can say that the Internet usage rate was 5% in 2001 and the population of Istanbul was 12 million, and the total current market was 600 thousand people. This analysis alone can be misleading, but when the business goes to the extreme, it will be a reference to whether the market looks attractive. On the other hand, past trends and future projections about Internet use should also be included in the analysis. As of today, internet access in Turkey has reached approximately 70% and Yemeksepeti's service area has expanded to the whole Turkey. In this case, the total existing market means 56 million people for Turkey’s population of 80 million. Yemeksepeti can only reach a certain segment of this market through its marketing, sales and promotion activities. This segment should be described as an accessible current market. The market research to be done for this can give information about how much this percentage is. Assuming that this figure is 15%, we can infer that Yemeksepeti currently has about 8 million users. (In the statistics published by Yemeksepeti in 2016, this figure is given as approximately 6 million.) In the beginning, however, there is no accessible market yet and the target market is the segment that is likely to be the first customer. Therefore, it is likely that this number is a number expressed in thousands at the start time.

Apart from the number of people, it is necessary to look at the turnover size of the market in order to understand the attractiveness of the market. For this, in the Yemeksepeti example, it is necessary to study figures such as the average number of orders per day, average basket size and average commission rate. According to the figures shared by Yemeksepeti in 2016, the company reached 1000 orders per day for the first time in its third year. Currently, it is stated that this figure is over two hundred thousand per day.

2.2. First customers and majority customers

As of the first day, the number of customers of a new business idea is zero. Therefore, the entrepreneur's main struggle will be about to make zero one. The techniques required for this are very different from the strategies and tactics required when the business grows. One of them is the difference between the first customers and the majority who will become customers later. For this, the Innovation Adoption Theory provides a very useful overview in marketing and entrepreneurship literature (Rogers, 2003; Moore, 2014). According to this theory, innovations are not accepted by the majority at a time, and the target audience gradually becomes the recipient of this innovation. According to this graph shown in Figure 3.3, the first customers of a company that wants to operate with a new technology, especially in a new market, will be innovators and early adopters. On the other hand, the group that is likely to be the majority of customers will not use your product until the innovation you offer reaches a certain level and is proven. An entrepreneur who understands and absorbs this graphic will be quite ahead in launching his product to the market. Thanks to this view, entrepreneurs will realize that the first customer is different from the majority customer and will concentrate all their efforts on innovative customers in the initial phase and stay away from the majority group that is very unlikely to become a customer.

There are two important places to be noted in this chart. The first is the small gap between innovators and early adopters, the other is the large gap between early adopters and the early majority. The reason why these places are described as an abyss is that these masses have different expectations, desires and needs. For this reason, there will be a serious difference between the segment using the product and service offered at the very beginning and the segment that will use this product in the future. The business needs to reach the majority for growth, but reaching the majority means developing and productizing the solution that makes the business more reliable. The early majority, who are expressed as pragmatists, act with herd psychology and want to have similar structures or model people used your product and refer to it. This is the corporate structure that avoids risk to try new products. This is why it is very difficult to partner with large companies from the first day or to sell products to corporate companies from the first day. Therefore, the entrepreneur should build his first-day target audience on the innovative group and achieve a success story thanks to this group. Then, when the time comes, he must first bypass the small abyss and ensure that the early adopters go ahead of the herd, and with the success story he has acquired here, he must give the early majority the confidence to follow the herd. Understanding the process described here is very important, especially for technology companies that appeal to new markets and companies that develop existing markets.

2.3. Understanding the needs, wants and demands

These concepts, which form the basis of creating value, guide how well your business idea will be accepted. A good business idea puts you in a stronger position in the competition by meeting a basic need of people in an innovative way or by redefining the market, making competition in the current market meaningless. For example, Pegasus airlines' entry into the market with cheap airline transportation value proposition is an example. Instead of competing with Turkish Airlines, Pegasus has persuaded many passengers who already travel by road, with prices similar to those of bus companies, to travel by air. In doing so, it has responded to the transportation needs of people in an innovative way.

As a general opinion, there is a claim that marketing creates a need. In fact, marketing responds to existing needs or sometimes creates a desire for products and services we don't need at all. Basic needs such as security, accommodation, eating, drinking, transportation, belonging, self-expression, which Maslow mentions in the hierarchy of needs are fixed (Şekil 3.4). Apart from these, there are many needs that we need to meet by having the things that we have or have formed due to the sociological structures of the societies we live in. Therefore, the part of marketing that should be criticized is not that it creates a need, but that it creates a desire when the person does not need it. The demand is that a product or service is preferred and purchasing power in an existing market. If a person wants a product but the purchasing power is insufficient, then this is not a demand but a request. For the request to be a demand, the target audience must have sufficient purchasing power to become a customer. Jobs with a market are jobs that have a demand. Jobs for which there is no demand or desire are either jobs without a market, or jobs waiting for an innovative product to enter the market that meets a hidden need that no one is aware of. In such a case, there is an uncertainty about the transformation of the new product or service into demand and demand in the market. Innovation includes jobs that target precisely this uncertainty and claim to respond to these hidden needs.

When developing new products, it is very important to understand the types of needs and to be able to accurately describe the problem you want to solve. In Figure 3.5, the needs are described in four types. The horizontal axis shows the degree of satisfaction of the need, while the vertical axis shows the degree of satisfaction resulting from meeting the need.

Accordingly, for fixed needs, as long as the need is met, it does not matter how the need is met. In a type of need such as drinking water when the person is thirsty, the person is in the psychology of famine. He just wants to get the product or service. Henry Ford, when he started car production, all he did was to reach production to demand and he said the following about it: "Everyone can choose a car in any color they want, as long as the color of the car is black, everyone will have their car." At that time, customers were more interested in owning a car than the color of the car. Today, trying to increase Tesla's production capacity, Elon Musk is trying to do the same for electric cars. Claiming to offer its newly produced "Tesla Model 3" for less than half the price of other electric cars, Tesla has managed to get pre-orders from nearly one million people for it. Therefore, in this type of need, supply is less than demand and production is the primary thing. In the mentioned examples, especially people in the innovative group lined up for this kind of need.

The second type of need is linear needs. Meeting linear needs is based on competition in the market. Whoever produces a cheaper, faster and better product or service will be more likely to be preferred and customer satisfaction will increase. Competing for this type of need requires being competitive and fighting. Many of the products in the current market compete for linear needs. The battle of two restaurants in the same region to grab customers, the struggle of the stores in the shopping center with each other, the competition of companies operating in the same market, etc. are examples of this situation. Today, competition in this area is quite advanced and it is getting more and more difficult.

The third type of need refers to the factors that must be met and is also referred to as the hygiene factor. Mandatory needs have become the industry standard and are factors that do not create extra satisfaction if they are met, but their lack causes great dissatisfaction. For example, we expect it to be clean from a shopping center, a school or a hospital, and safe from an airline company. However, we would not be extra pleased because the school is clean or the airline is safe. On the other hand, when we find the school clean and the airline safe, we will be extremely dissatisfied. Therefore, it is imperative to meet such needs. However, it does not provide any extra profit for the company.

The type of need that most concerns entrepreneurs who want to develop innovative ideas is hidden needs. Such needs are difficult to find, uncover, and discover. Only after uncovering it is possible to make competition meaningless. Unless there is a service or product that meets confidential needs, no one is dissatisfied with it. However, the customer satisfaction rate of initiatives that no one is aware of, discovering a hidden need and developing a business to meet it is very high. The increase in the welfare of modern society has been due to the emergence of such hidden needs and the presence of service providers who meet these needs. As in the example of Pegasus, the segment that used to travel by road has become able to travel more frequently and longer distances by air or as in the example of Yemeksepeti, people who have previously found ordering home troublesome, can easily learn about restaurants, order food at home and save time. However, when something is no longer secrecy and awareness is created about it, as others attempt to meet this previously hidden need, secret needs have come to light after a while due to the nature of competition. Therefore, these needs first become the demanded linear needs and then become a mandatory or constant need. Today, Wi-Fi, which is added as the basic need at the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, jokingly reflects this situation..

2.4. Trends

An entrepreneur who understands the differences between the habits, needs, wishes and demands of the target audience and takes these into consideration while developing his product will also follow trends and develop his business plan accordingly. The belief of the Yemeksepeti founders that Internet usage will become widespread and their support of this with data enabled them to stand behind their business ideas for years. For this, it will be useful to examine trends in other countries or similar markets. The entrepreneur has to anticipate what kind of developments are taking place in other comparable countries in the market he wants to enter and what the repercussions of this will be and make assumptions accordingly. In addition, there are some megatrends today, apart from the areas that specific and expert people can find with research. The term megatrend expresses some developments that affect the whole world and cause social changes. For example, healthy, organic, sustainable, environmentally friendly and social products that support natural life have been on the agenda all over the world. Therefore, business models that produce solutions in these areas will have a clear path. Fast food culture, which is identified with unhealthy nutrition, is also affected by this and includes healthy products in its menus to transform itself. Sharing economy and rental culture is another megatrend today. Previously, the only way to have it was to buy it. However, today it is possible to experience the experience and rent it for a while, even though you do not have it through sharing economy. At the same time, with this approach, which can be expressed as the use of idle capacity, many items and experiences such as empty rooms in homes, unused cars, idle items, used books, etc. can be quite useful for another person. Initiatives that provide this intermediary not only create value, they can also achieve great value in this way without stock or asset risk.

However, trends should not be confused with fashion or enthusiasm. Some products have a very rapid demand and may lose this demand in an instant. If an entrepreneur investing for this does not realize that this product is a fad, he may have made an investment in vain. Handset phone headsets can be given as an example (Figure 3.6). For a while, everyone was in demand for this product, but soon after, people turned to other fads. Entrepreneurs who are disturbed by the futility of such investments can also create a business model to find products of constant enthusiasm, short-term marketing and bring new ones. In Turkey, the firm named "Buldumbuldum" does exactly that. Fashion items have indefinite cycles. Products that are very popular at certain times can turn into products that no one will look at for a long time. It is necessary to know what will be in fashion when this type of product. Trends are neither enthusiastic nor fashionable. Trends, fashion, and fad make it more possible to predict how fast the demand will move towards which direction than products. In this way, the entrepreneur can plan ahead. Figure 3.7 shows how the demand for fad, fashion, and trend products changes over time.

2.5. Technology

Technology has been advancing at a tremendous speed, especially in the last decade. While previously technological developments surprised us, now we witness such incredible developments every day that we cannot even imagine the point where technology has come. Behind this development, there is a theory put forward by Gordon Moore, who founded Intel in 1964. Accordingly, the microchips would double the number of transistors inside every two years. Nowadays, microchips contain more than a billion transistors in nano sizes and microchips working at the quantum level are about to enter our lives for the next stage. The reflection of this on us is not the linear progress of the technology by adding "two plus two plus two ...", but the development by multiplying "two over two over two ...".

Moore's Law describes development in multiplying terms. However, the human mind is more inclined to understand linear development. To understand this, it is useful to compare linear development with mutliply development. Linear development is where one thinks the future will be with today's assumptions when we try to understand the future with today's conditions. Multiplying development occurs with the synergy and interaction that occurs as a result of the combination of many factors and triggering each other at the same time. Therefore, future expectations and analysis may come to a very different point than today's assumptions. This difference between the two expectations is called the "mutliplying growth surprise factor". (Figure 3.8). However, it is unclear in what term and how this development will come. Quantum computers and Blockchain technology, for example, are some of the areas where such an multiplying development is expected. It is very difficult to predict how these technologies will be used and when and how quickly they will change existing systems. On the other hand, when the day comes, change can occur very quickly and change many assumptions that we now consider fundamental. In this case, only those who are preparing for the new order can survive. History is fraught with the immediate transformative effect of such revolutionary and destructive innovations. Having said this, it should be reminded that. A good entrepreneur solves the problems that connect today and the near future, but is ready to adapt possible innovations and technologies by constantly improving his future vision. Otherwise, the future will never come for a person living in the permanent future, and opportunities will never be seized.