Non-obvious-obviously-big Markets

Some of the best didn't start in big markets

Some of the greatest breakout software companies over the past decade didn’t obsess over market size initially. Instead, they identified a few key things:

• How people do a specific thing today is not how they’ll do it tomorrow, and if that’s the case, the world will inevitably benefit from this

• They didn’t spend a ton of time preoccupied over market mapping, personas, and ICP. Instead, they talked to the smartest, best-aligned people, at best-aligned companies to the problem they were solving, who also had similarly strong conviction that this concept was inevitable. Most of the time, the size of this “market” was $10M - $50M in potential ARR at best (then)

• They leaned into the compounding earned secrets: qualitative inputs from customer conversations, experts in their networks, and constant feedback they heard validating that the future of their idea and market would grow into something much bigger

• They found some of the smartest customers and took their feedback to heart so much that they would actually prioritize fixes/needs based on that one person because they were clearly the trendsetter and the clearest thinker on where the market was headed

Great companies don’t always start in obviously large, high-demand markets. They earn every single dollar by talking to customers and gaining an edge in the market with a go-to-market mindset. They translate those learnings into raising meaningful amounts of capital over time as trends become glaringly evident years later.