Module 02 · The demo day pitch~12s dwell · weight 6
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.
Include
- 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
Cut
- 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
Red flags a reader notices
- 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
Pitfalls behind them
- 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
60-second self-test
- · 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?
Template
[Number of customers] x $[price] x [frequency] = $[bottom-up market number], inside a $[top-down category] market.
Weak
"The global payments industry is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity."
Strong
"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
Pick an answer. Nothing is graded, and correct answers stay hidden until you choose.
1. What does Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule imply about market-size slide time in a live pitch?
2. Why is bottom-up math preferred over a single TAM headline?