Market Entry Research for a New City

Almost every successful small Indian food brand hits the same wall at around six outlets: the home city is covered, growth has slowed, and the only way forward is a second city. That decision is usually made badly. A founder enjoys a weekend in Indore or Kochi, decides the crowd looks right, signs a lease on the busiest road they saw, and discovers eight months later that the footfall was seasonal, the rent was 40 percent above market, and the nearest competitor had already locked up the office-lunch crowd. A structured market entry study costs nothing but four weeks of careful work and routinely saves tens of lakhs.

The intern runs that study for Bindaas Bowls, a fictional Pune brand of ₹180 to ₹260 rice and salad bowls that is evaluating Indore as city number two. They build a TAM-SAM-SOM sizing model and a formula-driven three-year pilot P&L in google-sheets, benchmark twelve competitor outlets across three tiers on ten identical attributes, run a fourteen-question consented survey through google-forms to at least sixty Indore residents, score five candidate localities on a weighted hundred-point scorecard, write an eighteen-to-twenty-two page study in google-docs, and compress the whole argument into a twelve-slide investor deck in canva that ends on a single-sentence go, go-with-conditions, or no-go recommendation.

The project teaches market sizing from public data, competitive benchmarking, primary consumer research, weighted site selection, and the discipline of writing a recommendation you can defend under pressure. These are the core tasks of a business development, strategy consulting, or category management analyst, and a study with real Indore rent numbers and real survey data is far more persuasive in an interview than any coursework summary.