Size a new market before you enter it

Before you commit a year to a new city, you want one honest number: how many of your kind of customer actually exist there. Not a percentage of a national figure, not an estimate in a slide. A count.

That number is usually expensive. A research agency quotes four figures and takes three weeks. A free web search shows you the ten businesses with the best search ranking. A bought list gives you rows of unknown age. And none of them answer the question that really decides whether a market is workable: how many of those businesses you can reach without buying anything else.

A live map search answers both in an afternoon, for the price of a lunch. This guide walks through the method with a worked example, shows every sum, and is equally clear about what the map cannot tell you.

What you are actually trying to find out

Market entry looks like one big decision, but it rests on four inputs. Three of them are countable today:

• Volume. How many target businesses exist in the city right now, including the ones that opened last month.
• Reachability. How many of them have a working, verified email address, so your first campaign is possible at all.
• Shape. What the market looks like from the outside: ratings, review counts, how many have a website, where they cluster.

The fourth input, willingness to buy, is not countable, and a tool that claims to sell it is guessing. What you can do is remove the guesswork from the first three, then spend your judgement on the fourth.

The example: independent gyms in three cities

Suppose you sell scheduling software to independent gyms, the owner-run kind rather than the national chains. You have the budget to enter one market this year. The shortlist is Lisbon, Milan and Rotterdam, and the honest reason for the shortlist is that all three feel plausible.

The method is to run the same search in each city and change nothing but the place. Same business type, same wording, three areas. Leadralia sweeps the area you drew on the map and returns every matching business it finds, live, rather than the first page of a normal search. Each result arrives with name, address, phone, website, rating and review count.

Set a spending limit on every search. A limit of €20 caps a search at 1,000 businesses, because 1,000 × €0.02 = €20. If the city holds more than that, the search stops at your number and you have still learned something worth knowing: the market is bigger than 1,000, and you found that out for €20.

While the search runs, Leadralia looks for the email address behind each business on that business's own website, and verifies it. That part costs €0.00, so your sizing bill is only the businesses themselves.

The numbers, side by side

The counts in this table are illustrative. They are written here to show how the arithmetic works, not to report what any real search returns. Your own numbers come from your own searches; only the prices (€0.02 per business found, €0.00 per verified email, €0.05 per email sent) are fixed.

Reading the table

The first line under the table is the cheapest fact in the whole exercise: €8.40 + €15.60 + €3.60 = €27.60 to size all three cities. That is the entire cost of replacing three guesses with three counts.

The second reading is about reach, not volume. Milan is the biggest market by a wide margin, but the number that matters for a cold outreach plan is the verified-email count, and dividing the sizing cost by it gives you the cost of one reachable business:

• Lisbon: €8.40 / 210 = €0.040 per reachable gym.
• Milan: €15.60 / 445 = about €0.035 per reachable gym.
• Rotterdam: €3.60 / 115 = about €0.031 per reachable gym.

The third reading is the budget for a real first campaign, which is sizing plus sending:

• Lisbon: €8.40 + €10.50 = €18.90 to find every gym and email every reachable one.
• Milan: €15.60 + €22.25 = €37.85.
• Rotterdam: €3.60 + €5.75 = €9.35.

Now the decision has a shape. Milan is where the volume is, and it costs €37.85 to knock on every reachable door. Rotterdam is small enough to work by hand and costs €9.35 to cover completely, which makes it a cheap place to test the pitch before spending real time in Milan. That is a strategy conversation with numbers in it.

Two more views are worth the click. Export everything to Excel or CSV and you have a one-page market comparison to put in front of a co-founder or an investor. Open the map view and you can see how the businesses cluster by district, which tells you whether a city is one market or five neighbourhoods that happen to share a postcode.

Questions the map can answer

Within one search, and without any extra tooling, you can answer:

• How many businesses of this type exist in this area right now.
• How that count compares between cities, countries or single streets, since the same search works in 195 countries and down to one street.
• How the market is rated: the spread of star ratings and review counts, so you can see whether you face well-reviewed operators or mostly neglected listings.
• How many have a website at all, which is often a sharp proxy for how digital the market is.
• How many can be reached by email, verified before you can spend anything on them.
• Where they sit, on a map, by district.
• What it would cost to contact all of them, shown on screen before you send.

Questions it cannot answer

This matters more than the list above, because a sizing exercise built on a wrong assumption is worse than no sizing at all. Leadralia does not provide, and will not guess at:

• Revenue or turnover. There is no financial data in the results.
• Employee count or company size. A one-room studio and a large club can look the same in a listing.
• Buying intent. There is no signal about who is shopping for what you sell. Intent data is not part of the product.
• Decision-maker names. The email address is the business's own published address, not a named person, and there is no LinkedIn or personal profile data behind it.

Everything Leadralia returns comes from public business data: the business's own public listing and its own website. No bought databases, no data brokers, no personal profiles. That is the boundary, and it is worth knowing where it sits before you build a model on top of the export.

So: use the map for the count, the reachability and the shape. Use interviews and desk research for revenue, size and intent.

From sizing to first customers

Here is the part that changes the economics of the exercise. In most market research, the money is gone the moment the study is over. Here it is not: the list you sized the market with is the list you sell to.

The 420 Lisbon gyms are already in your account, each with a status, a note and a follow-up date. Pick the ones worth your time (sort by rating, by review count, by whether they have a website), describe your offer in a sentence, and the built-in AI writes a personal outreach message. You read it, change what you want, and approve it. The exact audience and the exact cost are on screen before anything goes out, every message ends with a one-line source sentence and a simple way to say no (send "no" to the address at the bottom), and replies land in an inbox inside Leadralia next to the lead they belong to. Emails go from your own mailbox: Gmail or Outlook connected in one click, or any SMTP mailbox.

And if you come back in six months to re-check a city, a business you already have is €0.00 in any later search, forever. You pay only for the gyms that opened since. That is why a sizing search is not sunk cost: it is the first and cheapest step of the campaign you were going to run anyway.

Do it in the local language

A market you are sizing is usually a market you do not work in daily, and that shows up in two places.

The interface is available in nine languages (English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish and Arabic), so the person doing the research can work in their own language while looking at a foreign city.

The outreach goes the other way. The AI drafts the message in the language of the market you are entering, so your first email to a Lisbon gym reads like it was written by someone who intends to do business in Portugal. You still read and approve every word before it is sent, which is the right amount of control in a language you do not speak fluently: have a native speaker check the approved draft once, and it is checked for the whole campaign.

Three questions before you start

How much does it cost to size one city? The number of businesses found × €0.02, and nothing else. Email addresses are found and verified at €0.00, and the spending limit you set on the search is a hard ceiling, so the bill can never pass your number. In the illustrative example above, three cities came to €27.60 in total.

How current is the count? Every search reads the map at the moment you run it. There is no stored list sitting behind the product, so a business that opened last month is in the results and a business that closed is not. That is the difference between a count and a snapshot someone took a year ago.

Can I try this without paying anything first? You can sign up with an email address or a Google account, without a card, and the free tier covers 25 searches and 25 email sends a month, which is enough to see how a search behaves in your category before you top up a wallet. Top-ups start at €5 by card, and the balance never expires.

Bottom line

If you are choosing between markets, the count is the input you can buy cheaply and the intent is the one you cannot buy at all. Get the count right, in every candidate city, before you argue about the rest.

For founders and expansion managers, the value is that a shortlist of three cities becomes three tables and one export in an afternoon, for less than the cost of the meeting where you would otherwise have debated it. For researchers, the value is that the list is complete and current rather than sampled. For both, the cost is arithmetic you can check in advance: businesses × €0.02, sends × €0.05, duplicates free.

If you want the full picture of what happens after the count, read what Leadralia does. If you would rather just run the first search, start free: no card, and 25 searches a month to see what your market actually looks like.