Finding customers and growing
TAM, SAM and SOM
TAM, SAM and SOM are three sizes of your market: everyone who could ever buy (total addressable market), the part your product can actually serve (serviceable available market), and the part you can realistically win soon (serviceable obtainable market).
Also called total addressable market, market size, TAM SAM SOM
Looking this up for a class, a job, or something you want to build? If it is the last one, nommi reads your idea before you spend months on it.
Investors look at them to judge whether a business could grow large. A figure is only as good as the counting behind it. A size built from the number of real customers you can reach, times what each one would pay, holds up better than a share of a big industry total taken from a report.
When this shows up
Example, not a real founder: your deck says you need only a small slice of a huge industry. An investor asks how many customers you can reach this year and what each would pay, and you have no answer.
What to do next
Count your SOM from the bottom up: the customers you can name a way to reach, times the price they would pay. Write down where each number came from.