How to Approach Market Sizing in Your Pitch Deck

Foreign opportunity slide. Why is this an important slide in a pitch deck? It matters because everybody's thinking risk, risk, risk as they think about most of these opportunities. But all investing is a balance of risk and reward. And I think this is your only opportunity in most pitch decks to really talk about the reward of if everything goes right, how does it paint up to a big opportunity? That's what the market slide really is about. And a lot of people do this in the really wrong way. And that's the Tam Sam Som. You've probably heard about it. Total available market served, available market. Anyways, take that framework and throw it in the trash. Totally useless framework in my mind because it doesn't tell me anything. You tell me it's $10 billion opportunity, $100 billion opportunity. Where does that come from? So let's talk about how to best do that. The most important way to approach a market opportunity slide is not from the tops down, it's from the bottoms up. Entrepreneurs who come in the door and start with the customer generally are the most successful entrepreneurs. And if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going in to make this pitch. I want to talk about an individual customer. I'm going to get X dollars from that individual customer. And then there's this many of those customers, right? All products are built sort of mvp kind of the minimum viable first initial product that's going after the minimum viable segment, initial segment that people are going after now. Are there other available customers that we can go to? The initial product that you build is not often the product that captures the biggest market opportunities. So you keep layering on different products and those can be extensions of the same product, new products, becoming a multi product company. And so the best market slides that I've seen talk about an individual customer, why this is so valuable to them. And then if we stack them up in this order and in this way and then deliver these products, we're going to get to a great opportunity and that's why we need the capital. It's such a better way to approach the story.