Ask HN: What is my market size? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is my market size?

8 pointsshahedkhan3010 comments

I'm trying to put together a Pitch Deck, but stumbled upon one of the slides.

What would my market cap be?

We're a platform where we connect people who don't have enough time to complete their daily errands, and people who want to make a quick buck and complete tasks in their area.

From where I see it, anyone who has a full-time job, and doesn't have time to run errands fits in our market cap.

139.206 million people are employed. 47% working full time meaning:

65.43 Million Americans are Full time workers

Is this a reasonable market cap?

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>"From where I see it, anyone who has a full-time job, and doesn't have time to run errands fits in our market"

All that shows is that you didn't do any research and pulled something out of your "back pocket." It's completely bullshit from a market analysis standpoint. You need to look at segmentation, and existing alternatives.

The relevant segments have disposable income - i.e. "good jobs" and they have to live in areas where it makes sense to provide the service, i.e. where there are people who can perform the errand reliably and are suitable to interact with the target demographic - "people who want to make a quick buck" often don't fit those requirements.

Mechanical Turk doesn't really scale to the meat world - in general it's not worth $3.00 to pick up someone's dry cleaning and deliver it to their door - never mind going through all kinds of rigamarole online to land the project and get paid.

Even if there is a meaningful target market segment which is not being served, the infrastructure to provide reliable services and maintain the concierge employees is a huge problem - the key to the success of Dabbawala is the people not the internet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala]

Market Capitalization (market cap) is a term from finance which refers to the number of shares of your company outstanding multiplied by the average dollar value of each share - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_capitalization . I think what you are after is potential market size, not market cap.

Anyways, one issue with your calculation is that you assume that 100% of people have the ability to use your service - I assume they need a computer, Internet access + a credit card of some type to use your service, and 100% of US full time works do not have all three those things.

Yes, thanks.

He means TAM, total addressable market.

IMHO: If you have space in your pitch deck for a slide about market cap, it's probably too long.

Try focusing on the product and your user exclusively. Your pitch deck's most important role is to explain to who ever is reading that there is a problem, how you think you can solve it and why you can do it and not somebody else.

Most people who read a lot of pitch decks would never read the part about market cap because usually the people making the decks overestimate it and don't usually have a clue about the actual MC.

The biggest problem in growth will probably be how you will get distribution, how you will join two separate markets or target audience and that's a really hard problem to solve.

The distribution and chicken'n'egg problem are a much bigger limiting factor than the market cap ever will be in your product, so don't worry about it.

Good luck!

This is a really helpful comment. Just want to give another vote for brevity and focusing on product and user details in the PD.

You don't have a market cap. At least not one that matters. Don't use that term in your deck; it means something completely different than what you think it means. Namely, it is the total value of your business based on what people have paid for a portion of its equity.

A better title for the slide you describe would be simply "Market" or "Market Size".

What would I put in the Market Size slide then? Would it be what I listed above?

It should be the maximum number of people that you can convincingly argue are potential customers. It sounds like you need to do more research.

If you say 65 million people in the US, you should be prepared to answer a question like: "Out of those 65 million people, how many have a spouse that doesn't work full time who fills this role?"

Agreed. Should definitely be more niche - also need to take into account internet usage and demographics such as disposable income. If someone works full time and makes less than $20K, they're probably not in your target market.

Rather than focus on TAM, focus on what your service brings to a potentially unlimited amount of users. I would never open a deck or conversation with 'we will max out at xxx'. That's like starting a job interview out with an apology for being late.

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