How much of your time and capital will be tied up in finding, creating, and receiving your products or materials? Can you outsource? How easy would it be to replicate your product?
What's good about your competitors' products or services? What could use improvement or be replaced with something better? What's your unique competitive advantage? To find out, read reviews on Amazon or Yelp or look for tweets and Facebook posts about the competition.
Want to learn about your competition's weaknesses? Use a SWOT analysis. The W stands for weaknesses! You can find SWOT analyses for most major companies by searching Business Source Complete for "(company name) AND SWOT".
Are there a lot of similar companies in this area (competitors)? How much do the competitors earn in revenue? How much do they spend on rent and payroll? Use the U.S. Businesses database within Reference Solutions to locate and analyze your competitors.
Access to data for both private and public companies, including businesses that have closed in the past five years. Also includes Consumers & Lifestyles and US Jobs/Internships.
Access note: Please clear browser cache before use.
Patent searching can be a little complex, because patents use very stylized language, and because they are often filed in particular nations (e.g. all US patents are filed with and disseminated by the US Patent and Trademark Office, while Japanese patents are filed and disseminated by a similar organization in Japan) but several tools can help you find them more efficiently.
Comprehensive chemical database accessing chemistry and medical literature.
Access note: Log in required. Register for a free account with your colorado.edu email address. Must use VPN to register from off campus. Public users - Please ask for assistance at a research desk.
Considering Boulder for your venture? The Boulder Economic Council has lots of facts about doing business in Boulder.
Find a snapshot of Boulder's demographic makeup, or download the BEC Market Profile for more detail.
Be sure to look at the business section of the Daily Camera and BizWest for news and research about local businesses and businesspeople.