StartUp Founders: Beyond The Billions


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.

​

​


​

β€ͺ8424 Santa Monica Blvd, Suite A523, Los Angeles, CA 90069
​Unsubscribe Β· Preferences​

StartUp To ScaleUp

Where 140k+ founders read my weekly newsletter offering tactical insights to start, scale, and fund their startup. Real advice from a 3x exited founder & author of the #1 Best Seller "Starting A StartUp | Build Something People Want."

Read more from StartUp To ScaleUp

Hey Reader, Happy New Year to you, your family, your friends, and the people who kept you sane. 2025 is done. 2026 is about AIB (Am I Better). Whatever post-mortem you needed to run. Run it.Whatever story you needed to tell yourself. Tell it. Let's not make weird promises about the version of you that magically appears in January. You, like everyone, spent the last week thinking about 2026 and what will be different. Maybe you wrote goals, set intentions, and prob told yourself this year...

Hey Reader, What are you doing today to out-execute the competition you don't even know exists yet? It's always you against you... For all your brilliance, vision, manifesting, and everything else that has you on the right path, it is highly likely you are operating like a snail, as in, you are just not moving fast enough. Personal velocity is the game at early stage. Outwork, outhustle, outfight, outdeliver. Again and again and again. But velocity without direction is just chaos. The best...

Hey Reader, At the end of any sales call, there is only one question that matters. What became riskier for them if they didn’t buy? If you can answer that clearly with the least amount of bias "their current process is failing, waiting now has a real consequence" then you have a wedge. If your honest answer is β€œnot much” then you have to ask, what doubt stayed symmetrical. Did the status quo still feel fine, did they doubt you and inaction equally? When doubt is symmetrical, nothing moves, if...