Total Addressable Market

mental-model

A habit can involve only a tiny fraction of people and still support a substantial business when the underlying population is enormous. Market size depends on the absolute number of reachable participants—not on whether their behavior looks mainstream.

Routine “good morning” messages can be the raw material for an industry. In India, the participating share does not need to be large: even a small slice of the population can amount to a huge total addressable market.

Multiply the niche by the base

The moving parts are population, participation, and monetization. Begin with the full population that could plausibly exhibit a behavior, estimate the fraction that actually does, then ask how much value each participant can generate through products, advertising, or distribution. A low participation rate can be outweighed by an exceptionally large base. That is why judging an opportunity by how common it feels in your own circle can be badly misleading: prevalence is a percentage, while a business serves a number of people.

Where it shows up

The good-morning niche

Businesses built around good-morning messages illustrate the arithmetic. The habit may look trivial or niche, but its absolute audience can still be large enough to create commercial demand.

A large audience is not yet a market

Population arithmetic can reveal possibility, but it does not prove that participants will pay, tolerate advertising, or be economical to reach. A huge theoretical audience may remain commercially weak when monetization is low or distribution costs absorb the value; Economies of Scale help only when volume actually reduces those costs.

Replace “too niche” with three numbers

For the next niche idea you encounter, write down the plausible base population, a conservative participation rate, and annual value per participant. Multiply them, then separately estimate the cost of reaching and serving that audience. This turns an intuition about obscurity into a testable market-size claim.

Episodes that teach this

Do You Know About The Billion Dollar "Good Morning" industry? - Future IQ · explained at 9:55 8,126 views
The transcript says that in India 'even if a small slice of the population does it, it's still a huge TAM' while discussing good morning message businesses.