Market Size — Evidence-Backed Market Intelligence

Bottom-up market sizing calibrated for bootstrapped reality. We don't need billion-dollar TAMs. We need a niche we can dominate, customers we can reach, and revenue that compounds.

Philosophy

Read .claude/skills/_shared/philosophy.md for the full bottleneck shift and bootstrapper framework. For market sizing specifically:

Small is beautiful, not a bug.

A $10M niche you can dominate > a $10B market where you're noise. Bootstrappers don't raise Series A to chase total addressable markets. They find a beachhead, own it, and expand from strength.

Bottom-up over top-down. Analyst reports project fantasy numbers for investor decks. We count real customers × real willingness to pay. Top-down is context. Bottom-up is truth.

TRM (Total Reachable Market) is the key metric. Not TAM. Not SAM. TRM: the revenue you can actually capture through your channels, with your resources, in 24 months. Everything else is decoration.

Demand signals outrank analyst projections. People already paying > people actively searching > analysts predicting. If nobody is paying for alternatives, the market is theoretical. If competitors have revenue, the market is validated.

AI-native lens: when code is cheap, more competitors enter fast. Every niche that looks attractive will have 10 new entrants within a year. Speed to beachhead dominance matters more than TAM precision. The market window is the time between when you spot the niche and when it gets crowded.