There’s one difficulty I’ve began to see increasingly usually: Startup founders, of their desperation to indicate how massive their markets are, overstep the mark considerably, claiming numbers for his or her TAM/SAM/SOM which can be unobtainable and absurd.
I get it: You wish to seem to be you’re constructing a really beneficial firm. However within the pitch course of, you continue to have to take care of a way of honesty.
Once you’re attempting to drill down on the entire addressable market, the entire serviceable market and the entire obtainable market, be very cautious that you just’re telling the precise story.
The difficulty turned notably clear in a recent pitch deck teardown of Vori’s pitch deck, but it surely appears unfair to name them out for it individually; it’s a typical difficulty in quite a lot of pitch decks I see.
In Vori’s pitch deck, the next slide seems:
That’s not your SOM. Picture Credit score: Vori
On this slide, Vori talks about “the most important undigitized retail phase,” which is probably going right, however the $765 billion of complete spending within the U.S. isn’t the market measurement — that is the dimensions all spending, by shoppers, in grocery shops. (Statista has some interesting numbers there.)
Buyers are smarter than that
The issue is, Vori isn’t launching a grocery retailer, however a software for grocery shops. In different phrases, even when Vori’s enterprise does in addition to it will probably, and it will get 100% market share throughout each single unbiased grocery store on the planet, that doesn’t imply that the corporate can have $250 billion of turnover: It implies that the business it serves turns over that amount of cash.
Nowhere in its slide deck does the corporate tackle what it thinks is the higher fringe of the quantity of turnover in its business. That might be performed bottom-up (how a lot cash are indie supermarkets spending on stock-keeping and analytics software program, how a lot might that market develop and what number of these shops might you may have as your clients?) or top-down (what number of supermarkets are there, multiplied by the worth of your providers per grocery store — that’s your complete market measurement).
I perceive why Vori selected to make use of these numbers, however they’re basically meaningless at finest, clueless at medium-good and misleading at worst. As a startup, you wish to just remember to paint a rosy, aggressive image of development, for certain, however don’t fall for the temptation to make use of the most important numbers you could find. For instance: In case you are a automobile dealership, your complete serviceable market isn’t the worth of the automobiles you promote (that’s the SOM for the automobile producer). Your SOM is the entire worth of the gross sales commissions, service plans, aftermarket items and providers and every thing else you possibly can truly generate income on. Don’t confuse the 2!
That is an excerpt from the total pitch deck teardown of Vori’s deck. You may be taught this, and far more, from my weekly pitch deck teardown column on TechCrunch+!
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