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Isn't the sizing of markets something of marketers need to do, all day long? You can't blow $20k for a Gartner report every time you imagine a new market. You need to be able to make some ballpark estimates.

These 'stupid impossible questions' have a long history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

(Barbers cut the hair of half the population (the male half) around every two months. The population of San Francisco is about 750k. A haircut takes about 30 minutes, and about 50% of the time a barber is cutting hair. This gives about 8 cuts per day, or about 60x8 = 480 haircuts per every two months. So to service 750k/2 of the population you need about 750k / (2 x 480)) = about 781 barbers. Or roughly one out of a thousand people is a barber.)



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