I see founders walk into board meetings with beautiful, detailed maps.
They show page after page of analysis, charts, and numbers. They have calculated the Total Addressable Market—the TAM—down to the last decimal point. They point to the map with confidence, showing their investors exactly where the treasure is buried.
The only problem is, the map is of the old world.
You are trying to discover a new one.
You cannot measure a market that you are in the process of creating.
This is a truth that every category-defining founder must grapple with. Your investors will ask for a TAM analysis. Your advisors will demand it. They are asking you to do the impossible: to look in the rearview mirror to see the road ahead.
When the paradigm shifts, a TAM analysis is not a north star. It is an anchor. It tethers your thinking to the world that is, not the world that could be.
It forces you to ask the wrong questions.
When the first automobile was built, a TAM analysis would have asked, "How many people currently own a horse and buggy?" That question is a trap. It forces you to define your revolution in the language of the old regime. It completely misses the point that the car would not just replace the horse; it would create suburbs, superhighways, and a new way of life.
The market for the car was not the number of horse owners. The market was the human desire for freedom.
Your job as a founder in a new category is not to measure the existing container. It is to show how your invention will shatter the container and create a new one, ten times larger.
The real metric is not the size of the current market. The real metric is the intensity of the pain you are solving for your first ten customers. That is your only true signal.
So, let me ask you this: Are you looking at a map or a compass?
A map shows you the known world. It is detailed, safe, and utterly useless when you sail off the edge of it.
A compass doesn't show you the terrain. It just points you in a direction.
Your compass is the unwavering conviction that a better way is possible. It is the obsession of your early users. It is the problem you can’t stop thinking about.
Stop trying to read the map of where the market is.
Start following the compass of where it is going.