The Market You Can Actually Reach

Small towns have diners with "World Famous" painted on the window.

World famous for the pie, usually. And the pie may well be excellent — that's not the joke. The joke is the geography. Somebody stood in a town of four thousand people and chose the largest available claim, because the largest available claim felt like the safest one.

It has the opposite effect. "World Famous" makes you doubt the pie. "Best pie in the county, since 1974" makes you want to try it.

Market size slides are painted on the same window.

The global market is worth eighty billion dollars. It's growing at nine percent. And then the sentence that has sunk more pitches than any other in fundraising: if we capture just one percent…

The number is usually real. That's what makes it feel safe. Somebody's research firm published it and you can cite it.

But an investor isn't evaluating the size of the ocean. They're evaluating whether you can catch fish, and a slide about the ocean tells them nothing about that. Worse, "just one percent" quietly says you don't know which customers you'd get or how — because if you did, you'd have described those instead. It's the largest available claim, chosen because it felt safest.

The version that works runs the other direction, and it's more work.

Start with a customer you can name. How many companies look like that one — actually, from a list you could build? What do they each pay per year, at your real price? Multiply. That number is smaller and it is enormously more convincing, because every part of it can be interrogated and survives being interrogated.

Then show the ring outside it: adjacent segments you reach later, and what has to be true first. Now the big number reappears, but as a destination with a route attached, rather than a backdrop.

The small honest number does something the big one can't. It tells the room you know exactly who your first hundred customers are.

Nobody funds a percentage of an ocean. They fund the person who can name the first hundred fish.

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More on sizing a market from the bottom up in The Pitch Deck Book.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.