I have sat through hundreds of pitch decks. I have seen countless presentations from founders brimming with passion and caffeine. And in almost every single one, there is the inevitable slide labelled TAM (Total Addressable Market).

It is presented as the cornerstone of the investment thesis. Look at this huge number! Look at the billions we could capture! It is meant to inspire confidence, but to a seasoned eye, it often signals one thing: a profound lack of imagination.

Let me be clear: in the current economy, obsessing over a predetermined, static market size is intellectual laziness. It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how exponential value is actually created. Your market-size slide is useless. It is the metric of the incremental thinker—the person who assumes the world today is the final, finished product.

The tyranny of the existing pie

The typical market analysis starts with an established industry, slices it up into tidy segments, and then claims a tiny percentage of the existing revenue stream. This approach is profoundly limiting. It commits the entrepreneur to a war of attrition where one fights aggressively over the same customers that two dozen well-funded competitors are already fighting for.

This mindset forces you to think vertically: How can I get ten per cent more of the market already defined by my incumbent rival? It anchors your ambition to the current state of affairs, assuming that customer behaviour, technology, and needs will remain exactly as they are right now.

The largest, most enduring companies of the last two decades — the true titans of value creation — did not win by taking a tiny slice of an existing, defined market. They won by performing a strategic judo move: they created entirely new markets that were invisible to the old way of thinking. Before these companies existed, their market size was functionally zero.

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Lateral movement: The key to invisible markets

The strategic move that matters is lateral movement. This is the ability to look at an existing, painful problem and solve it by linking two previously unrelated concepts, thereby defining a whole new category of demand.

Consider the example of the modern smartphone. Its initial market size wasn’t based on the “mobile phone market,” which was finite. It’s true, a massive market size was created by linking three separate, previously unconnected markets: mobile communication, digital photography, and personal computing. The market was created in the overlap, not claimed from the existing carriers.

Lateral thinkers use the existing market size only as a base, a launchpad for understanding the current customer’s frustration. They don’t see the figure as a ceiling; they see it as a springboard. They ask: What is this customer trying to achieve today, and how can I invent a solution that makes their current behaviour obsolete?

From analysis to strategy

This is the main strategy of entrepreneurship: transforming a rigid, defined need into a fluid, limitless opportunity. It requires moving the focus from the external metric (the size of the market) to the internal insight (the depth of the customer pain).

The strategic conversation should not be: Our TAM is US$50 billion. The strategic conversation must be: We are solving a problem that is so severe, so expensive, and so pervasive that it will compel the creation of a new, US$100 billion category of spending.

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For the founder, this means abandoning the easy comfort of benchmarking against rivals. It means looking for the latent demand, the unvoiced frustration, and the structural inefficiency that no one has dared to tackle because it required combining resources in a way the old industry structure deemed impossible or illogical.

So, the next time you are building a pitch deck, use the existing market size figure for two purposes only: context and contrast. Use it to show the investors what the existing, poor solution looks like, and then immediately pivot to demonstrating how your lateral strategy will invalidate that entire number, compelling customers to flow into the vibrant, wide-open space you have just engineered.

If your sole competitive strategy is to capture five per cent of a market that already exists, aren’t you just admitting you plan to be marginally better, rather than truly indispensable?

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