When looking at a business, I believe the market size has little meaning.
Because if your business does extremely well in one area, it has potential to expand to another market.
However this means “extremely well”, in other words “10 times” better, in a way that it stands out distinctly different from others. In a nutshell, to a person who makes “Zero to One” possible, market size means nothing.
Take Amazon, for example.
They were exceptionally successful at selling books, so they expanded to become an e-commerce company that sells other things.
And while trying to optimize servers to its maximum, Amazon developed AWS.
As for selling books, one could have imagined Amazon entering the general e-commerce business. However if Bezos included AWS in the company’s addressable market at the beginning, people would have thought he was insane.
Yet, for people who cannot achieve “Zero to One”, market sizes are critical. Without much difference in terms of business model, manpower and other variables, it becomes crucial which part of the market to target and how to avoid competition.
With Amazon’s case in mind, I strive to find a better way and become excellent in all areas. Zero to One is not achieved in the blink of an eye. If you push little by little to be better than yesterday, you get to the point where progress piles up and it is presentable to others.
Google was initially a search engine for scholarly literature at Stanford. The market for this business item could have been defined simply as scholarly literature, or as all the information in the World. The difference is, executing outstandingly.
For the reasons mentioned above, I believe ideas are of marginal importance. Market size is simply a communication method used to convey my point of view to investors and colleagues.
Although it is a shame, that I keep the completed puzzle of my business to myself. People would call me crazy if I displayed all the adjacent markets on the map. With excellent competence, I will show Adler’s AWS.
