profile

StartUp To ScaleUp

StartUp Founders: Beyond The Billions

Published over 1 year ago • 2 min read

Hey Reader,

Market sizing is more than a pitch deck requirement. Once you've worked out it's BIG, it becomes an internal guide for every feature, expansion play, and strategic decision. (𝕏 Tweet)

Sizing your market might feel a touch impractical, but it's about the story it tells, the reality it cloaks and the future it hints at. This process unfolds in the framework of acronyms: TAM, SAM, SOM & TTAM complimented with a fab dose of SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess). (𝕏)

Dismissing the criticality of market sizing reflects a tragic misunderstanding of its significance. It's the start of the only thing that matters, securing customers one by one by one.

TLDR; This week's market sizing workbook breaks down the formula into manageable steps with the right questions to guide you.

Everything You Need For Custom Domains

​Entri Connect gives your SaaS faster user adoption and better retention by automatically configuring DNS records for your users.
​
A seamless user experience for selling & connecting custom domains with no support tickets 😊
Try Entri today.
​Want to get in front of 140,000+ founders? Go here.

LAST WEEKS FRAMEWORK:

​1.9 StartUp Founders: The 5 Pillars aka Empathetic Thinking

LETS GET INTO IT:

Market sizing, with its acronyms TAM, SAM, and SOM, feels like a moving target. Perspectives vary, opinions are wide, top-down or bottom-up, customer numbers or market value.

The top-down approach is often inevitable (total market spend) at the beginning, guiding your strategy until your model, pricing, and roadmap have enough clarity to go bottom-up and identify, prioritize and build for near term growth.

TAM (Total Addressable Market): The widest possible market for your product.

SAM (Serviceable Available Market): The portion of TAM accessible with your product as it stands.

SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market): The part of SAM you can capture in the near term with existing resources.

TTAM (True Total Addressable Market): The realistic market size before you added a zero. The one you are truly truly building into.

This workbook might help you think about thinking:

The true gain of this process is in your ability to just better understand the market your are playing in, it's a forced exercise in research and analysis....

It might feel audacious, to present an early stage pitch deck that outlines a journey to dominate a billion-dollar market. Who are you to think you can guide this StartUp towards $100m ARR? Funny you should ask. You're the founder who believes it. At your core.

If you catch traction, your next move is to aggressively grow your TTAM each year, always searching for a bigger market to extend into. Look at Hubspot: $1.5bn ARR from just 10% of the market.

As always, you are welcome to grab time with me.

Good luck.

-- James
​

​

Not A Subscriber?

Join 140k+ StartUp Founders reading my weekly newsletter offering tactical insights to start, scale, and fund their startup. Real advice from a 3x exited founder.

​

​

​

‪8424 Santa Monica Blvd, Suite A523, Los Angeles, CA 90069
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

StartUp To ScaleUp

by James Sinclair

Where 140k+ founders read my weekly newsletter offering tactical insights to start, scale, and fund their startup. Real advice from a 3x exited founder.

Read more from StartUp To ScaleUp
Hard No

Hey Reader, Implicitly or explicitly, the most common word a founder ever hears is no. And just to be clear. There’s a difference in no. There’s “no” as a boundary. The kind that protects, that ends the conversation. And there’s “no” as a negotiation. The kind that starts it. I have a six-year-old.“No, you can’t have your iPad” is a negotiation.“No, you can’t climb inside the fireplace and up the chimney” is a boundary. What we’re talking about here is the negotiation kind. The no that shows...

1 day ago • 5 min read
Customer Hostage

Hey Reader, The line between early traction and early captivity is razor thin. No matter who you are, frictionless B2C to heavy B2B, your first customers are, by design, total mayhem at best. They expose the sh*t that's broken. The sh*t you forgot. The support doc you never wrote. The button in the wrong place. The button missing. All of it. Go deeper, the infrastructure that cannot handle the load, the observability missing so you have no idea what's happening. All of it. The great thing...

8 days ago • 7 min read
The Memo

Hey Reader, Thanks for supporting my book launch the last two weeks, I am incredibly thankful for your support. This week isn’t a newsletter. It’s a memo. The market looks better than ever and worse than ever. Multiples make no sense. AI is rewriting the rules. Money’s flying, but not always toward you. The default triple, triple, double, double that used to guarantee venture investment is gone. Churn is brutal. Pricing models are delusional. Breathing room is non-existent. The market is...

15 days ago • 5 min read