Market size of an online-transportation service such as Uber/grab bike in a day

Hi,

here's how I would approach it

- Define the geographic area to be covered [the whole world? the U.S.? NYC? Manhattan?...for this example I'll use Manhattan]

- Population living there [~ 1.5 M] + population travelling there for work or leisure [not sure about the figure, anything in the 50 - 100 M a year range]

- Divide the travellers figure per days of the year [100 M / 365 ≈ 275k]

- Assume a very low number of travellers comes to Manhattan by car [I'll say it's 0%] and most of the local population doesn't have / use the car [10% of people own a car and use it daily]

- The potential market for your service will be [275k] + [1.5 M * 90%] = [1.625 M]

- Assume [50%] of these people use public transportation, [20%] uses taxis and another [20%] either walks or bikes: this leaves you with [10% ~ 163k] potential daily customers

- Assume there's [10] competitors in this market with an equal market share: your company will process [10% of the transactions ~ 16k transactions a day]

All of the assumptions I used can obviously be challenged and can also be addressed by specific questions to the interviewer.

Hope this helped.

Best,

marco