Where Do Founders Get Their Market Data? Nine Sources That Aren’t a Press Release
You need a number for the deck by Thursday. Here is where to get one that survives a due diligence question.
Every founder eventually needs a market statistic, and the internet is enormously willing to supply one. The problem arrives later, when somebody who invests for a living asks where it came from and you realise it came from a blog quoting a blog.
These nine are all traceable to something primary.
1. What does the regulator publish?
For anything financial, the FCA publishes research, consultation papers and enforcement data, all free. Dry as sand and completely citable, which is the trade you want.
2. Where do you get company-level numbers?
Companies House. Any UK company’s filed accounts, downloadable for nothing. If your market claim involves a competitor’s revenue, this is the honest way to make it.
3. What about official statistics?
The ONS for anything demographic or economic. Slow-moving, methodologically documented, and the closest thing to an unarguable source in a pitch meeting.
4. Who tests products rather than describing them?
For consumer financial products, the useful sources fund their own testing. The Investors Centre opens and funds live accounts with its own money to test UK trading platforms rather than compiling rankings from providers’ published fee schedules, so the product claims trace back to something you can check.
Check the scope before you borrow the finding, though. Testing of that kind covers a fixed list of platforms, which makes it strong evidence about what a named product charges and no evidence at all about the size of a market. Founders usually arrive wanting the second of those, and the honest answer from a testing source is that it does not have it.
5. Where do trade bodies help?
Industry associations publish membership data and sector surveys. Treat the framing with caution and the underlying numbers as usable – they have members to please, but the data collection is often genuinely rigorous.
6. What about academic work?
Google Scholar, filtered to the last five years. Slower to find, much harder to dismiss, and occasionally it will demolish an assumption you were about to build a slide on.
7. Where do you find pricing reality?
Competitor pricing pages, archived. The Wayback Machine lets you show how a market’s pricing has moved, which is frequently a stronger argument than a static snapshot.
8. Who publishes usable survey data?
The big consultancies, for free summaries. Methodology is often thin, so cite them for direction of travel rather than precision.
9. And when you need it in ten minutes?
A calculator and your own assumptions, clearly labelled as your own assumptions. An honest model beats a borrowed statistic, and investors respond better to it than founders expect.
What makes a statistic fall apart in a meeting?
Three things, in ascending order of embarrassment. The number cannot be traced to anything primary. The number is real but measures something adjacent to your claim. Or the number is four years old in a market that moved last year. The second is the most common and the hardest to spot in your own deck. A statistic about total market value is not a statistic about addressable market, and an investor who knows the sector will notice the substitution immediately.
The defence is dull and effective: write the source and the date next to every number in your working notes, and read them back once before the meeting.
This happens constantly in a new category. Nobody has classified the market yet, so there is no published figure for its size, and hunting for one produces the worst kind of citation: a number about an adjacent market, borrowed because it was there. The alternative is a build from two or three inputs you can source separately, multiplied in front of the reader.
An investor will accept that. What they will not accept is a build presented as a finding. Put the inputs, their sources and the arithmetic on one slide in the appendix, and the model becomes a demonstration of how you think rather than a claim you cannot support. Several partners will turn to that slide first, and one of them will change an input to see what happens, which is exactly why you showed it.
Why does a dull source beat a famous one?
Because the dull one publishes its method. A plain table from a statistics agency will hold up under questioning in a way that a headline figure from a well-known report often will not, because the report has a communications team behind it and the table has a methodology note. Recognition and provenance are different things, and only one of them survives a follow-up question.
The exception is when your audience already trusts a particular source and your argument runs against it. Then cite it anyway, accept its method, and show where your market sits inside its numbers. Arguing with a source an investor rates is a much harder position than arguing from inside it.
Which source for which slide?
| Slide | Best source | Why it survives scrutiny |
| Market size | ONS or regulator data | Methodology is published |
| Competitor position | Companies House filings | Their own numbers |
| Pricing dynamics | Archived pricing pages | Dated evidence |
| Product quality claims | Independent funded testing | Somebody paid to verify, on a named and limited list |
| Trend direction | Academic or consultancy work | Peer-reviewed or methodological |
| Unit economics | Your own model, labelled | Honest and defensible |
Match the claim to the source. The wrong source is worse than no number.
Never cite anything you have not clicked through to. It takes a minute and it is the difference between a number that helps you and a number that ends a meeting badly.