Market size
Show the market is big enough to matter, built bottom-up from a real unit of revenue rather than a top-down industry report number.
Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule allots roughly one slide of a 10-slide deck to market size; compressed into a 3-minute stage pitch that is about 10-12 seconds of spoken time.
- A bottom-up calculation: units x price x frequency
- The specific customer segment you sell to first
- One credible top-down number as a sanity check, not the headline
- A dollar figure the room can sanity-check in their head
- A single giant TAM number with no math shown
- Three overlapping market-size acronyms (TAM/SAM/SOM) crammed onto one slide
- Market research quotes with no source
- The market number is a $1 trillion+ round figure with no derivation
- The slide cites 'Gartner says' with no bottom-up math behind it
- The market size has no connection to the pricing shown later
- Reciting a huge TAM figure without explaining how it was calculated
- Using a market-size number that does not match your actual pricing model
- Spending more stage time on market size than on traction
- · Can I derive my market number out loud from price times customer count in one breath?
- · Would an investor's gut-check math land within range of my slide?
[Number of customers] x $[price] x [frequency] = $[bottom-up market number], inside a $[top-down category] market.
"The global payments industry is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity."
"4.5M contractors get paid by US companies each year. At $8 per payment, 12 payments a year, that's a $432M wedge inside a $150B cross-border payments market."
Nimbus Payroll's number is built from a per-contractor price and payment frequency, not lifted from an analyst report.
Quick quiz
1. What does Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule imply about market-size slide time in a live pitch?
- ○ It should take up half the pitch
- ✓ It gets roughly one slide's worth of time, not more
- ○ It should be skipped entirely
- ○ It should be the closing slide
A 10-slide, 20-minute framework gives each slide about 2 minutes; compressed into a 3-minute stage pitch, market size gets seconds, not minutes.
2. Why is bottom-up math preferred over a single TAM headline?
- ○ It sounds more impressive
- ✓ Investors cannot verify top-down numbers quickly, but they can check price x volume in their head
- ○ Bottom-up numbers are always bigger
- ○ It removes the need for traction data
Bottom-up math gives the room a verifiable calculation instead of an unfalsifiable market report figure.