I was recently interviewed for an Inbound Marketing role at a tech startup. One of the questions asked was "How many cows are there in India?" If you were the interviewer, what would you have learnt about me and my marketing skills through the question?

For Market-sizing questions like this, it doesn't matter what each specific question ask. Every question is extremely similar in term of the approach. Interviewers often spontaneously make up market-sizing question like this. So there's no point of learning a number of specific questions. It's way more important to learn the method. We developed a detail and compact video with magical 4-step approach on just that. Feel free to check it out: Hope this helps!

Q : how many cows are there in india ?India population : 100 crores number of house hold : 100 crore / 4 = 25 crore house hold let say each house an average consume 1 litre of milk ( its average , because some house consume. half liter of milk , some consume 2 liters, some dont consume at all ,there are also sweet shops who consume more milk for sweets ....by considering all this factor , we average consupmation of milk to be 1 liters )25 *1 = 25 crore liters of milk ( milk can be from cow,buffalo, goat,As we know that , each animal like (cow,buffalo, goat, sheep etcs...) on average produce 5 liters of milk .so total milk producing animals to be  25 crore liters of milk/ 5 liters= 5 crore animalsHence 5 crore of milk producing animals .Now cow contribute 30 %. buffaloes 50 % ...remaining rest of percentage so  .3* 5 crore = 1.5 crore Hence 1.5 crore of cows in india

India's population = 1.2bnAround 40% of this population lives in villages and 60% in cities.Thus 480mn live in villages. Average household size in villages around 8 (joint families, higher fertility rate). So the total households are around 480mn/8 = 60mn.Out of these 60mn households many are poor who live below poverty level and many are poor peasants and informal workers are well. So let us assume that around 30% of the rural households own cows. Thus no. of households having cows = 0.3*60mn = 18mn.Now on an average these 18mn households own 2 cows each. That takes our figure to 18*2 = 36mn.Now there are many cows in slaughterhouses, many poor people may also own cows and taking in consideration some error we add around 10% more to this figure i.e. 36*1.1 = 39.6mnNow in urban India not many own cows but there are dairy centres in every city and town that breed cows. So taking the number of cows in urban India to be around 5% of the no.of cows in rural India, we get the no.of cows in urban India as 0.05*39.6 = 1.98 mnTotal cows in India = 39.6+1.98 = 41.58mn

How many new smokers are added to the population of India every year :-) It's a classical question. We have to know where to start and that shows presence of mind. Deductive logic can be applied in different ways (e.g., the cows counting example of Rudrendra.) When asked how many companies are likely to buy cloud based HR Software like emportant, we estimate the number of SMEs and then try to size them for 50-500 employee organisations and deduce from there. Some such approach can be used for almost anything. Including calculating the number of new smokers!

Hi well we can approach this question as belowThe population of India is 1.2 billionThe people below poverty line compromise of 15% of population.  So milk consumption could be coming from 85% that is approx.  0.96 billion. The average family size is 4 so we have around. 0.24 billion family.  The consumption of milk by one family could be approximated to 1 litre per day  + milk consumed in indirect form like curd, sweets etc.  0.5 litres. Which give us around. 16 billion letres of milk required everyday.   Since consumption of buffalo's milk  is more than average.  So from cow we could be getting almost 40%  of milk.  So we require 0.064 billion litres cow  milkNow  on an average a cow gives 15 litres of milk in a day so  turns out to be approx 0.004 billion cows

1) population of cows in India is say 1.2 billion 2) say for example per  person milk consumption is 1/2 liters/day(it should  be more than  .1 lit and should be less than 1lit  as in india consumption is just about world's avg. taking G.M we .333 rounded to .5) so total milk required is .5 * 1.2 *10^9 lit 3)say avg cow produces 5 lit approx per day so total no of cows =.5*1.2*10^9/5=120 million (actual answer is round about 280 million)