How Do You Build a Market Baseline Where Facts and Estimates Stay Separate?

The situation behind the search

A founder usually starts this search after one meeting: an investor asked where the market number came from, and the honest answer was 'a slide someone sent me'. Baselines fail in review for one repeated reason — facts, estimates, and hopes arrive merged into single confident sentences.

Separating them is the whole discipline. A fact here means an observation with a named source; an estimate means arithmetic on top of facts; an assumption means something you are choosing to believe. Inquoria may describe candidate workflows and sample outputs from the sources you supply, and it does not promise accurate sizing or exhaustive coverage.

What to assemble before framing the baseline

Write the decision the research must inform and the scope it must respect: geography, segment, time window. A baseline without boundaries grows until nobody can audit it.

Collect the sources you already have rights to use: public reports, industry publications, government statistics, plus any internal data worth citing. Note each source's date and publisher as you gather it; those two fields decide half the later arguments.

Step 1: Frame the question and fix the scope

State what decision this baseline serves and write the boundaries beside it. 'The European market' invites drift; 'paid B2B SaaS HR tools, DACH, 2024–2026' can actually be finished.

Step 2: Register sources before drawing conclusions

Enter each source into the register with publisher, date, and what kind of evidence it offers. Doing this first keeps later statements honest, because every claim now has somewhere concrete to point.

Step 3: Fill the fact base with cited observations only

Record what sources directly state: prices observed, units reported, regulations in force. If a sentence cannot carry a citation, it does not belong in the fact base yet, whatever its pedigree.

Step 4: Move arithmetic into labeled estimates

Sizing always requires calculation beyond the facts. Do it openly: take cited inputs, show the multiplication, and file the result as an estimate with its formula attached. An estimate that shows its work can be challenged and improved; a bare number can only be argued with.

Step 5: Write the assumptions where reviewers will see them

Every estimate rests on choices — growth rates held flat, segments treated as one, currency conversions at fixed rates. List them as assumptions in plain sight rather than burying them in method notes nobody opens.

Step 6: Audit citations, then assemble the brief

Before drafting, walk the audit: does each important statement still point to a live source entry, and does every number declare which column it lives in? Then assemble the cited brief from the cleaned base. Each important statement needs a source and a clear distinction between fact and estimate; the audit exists to catch the ones that lost either.

Testing whether the baseline survives contact

Give the draft brief to someone motivated to disagree and ask them to attack three statements of their choice. Every attacked statement should resolve to a citation or a visible estimate within a minute. If any answer requires your narration, the baseline is not yet self-defending.

What this process cannot promise

Each important statement needs a source and a clear distinction between fact and estimate. Coverage, source quality, estimates, market sizes, and recommendations require expert verification. Inquoria may describe candidate workflows and sample outputs from the sources you supply, and it may use entered information for review and planning.

No proprietary data access, exhaustive research, trustworthy-decision guarantee, or production availability is claimed. Public sources age, paid sources have licenses, and a clean separation of facts from estimates improves honesty, not accuracy by itself.

Inquoria's place in the workflow

Inquoria holds the scope, the source register, the fact base, and the estimates side by side, so mixing categories takes deliberate effort instead of happening by accident. Ask it to keep citations beside claims, expose the assumption list, and assemble the report draft only after the citation audit passes.

You still judge source quality, choose the arithmetic, and defend the numbers in the room. The workspace makes the baseline auditable; being right stays your problem.