Size markets using narratives, not numbers
Anyone who has pitched VCs knows they are obsessed with market size. If you can’t make the case that you’re addressing a possible billion dollar market, you’ll have difficulty getting VCs to invest. (Smaller, venture-style investors like angels and seed funds also prioritize market size but are usually more flexible – they’ll often invest when the market is “only” ~$100M). This is perfectly rational since VC returns tend to be driven by a few big hits in big markets.
For early-stage companies, you should never rely on quantitative analysis to estimate market size. Venture-style startups are bets on broad, secular trends. Good VCs understand this. Bad VCs don’t, and waste time on things like interviewing potential customers and building spreadsheets that estimate market size from the bottom-up.
The only way to understand and predict large new markets is through narratives. Some popular current narratives include: people are spending more and more time online and somehow brand advertisers will find a way to effectively influence them; social link sharing is becoming an increasingly significant source of website traffic and somehow will be monetized; mobile devices are becoming powerful enough to replace laptops for most tasks and will unleash a flood of new applications and business models.
As an entrepreneur, you shouldn’t raise VC unless you truly believe a narrative where your company is a billion dollar business. But deploying narratives is also an important tactic. VCs are financiers — quantitative analysis is their home turf. If you are arguing market size with a VC using a spreadsheet, you’ve already lost the debate.
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