Market size and reachability

What this measures

Market size and reachability ask two questions that both have to be true: are there enough buyers to build a real business, and can you actually get in front of them at a cost you can afford. A market can be large and still be unreachable. A market can be small and still be a fine business if you can reach every buyer cheaply.

The score is highest when the number of buyers is healthy at the price you can charge and there is a clear, affordable path to them. It drops when buyers are few, scattered, or expensive to find.

Why it matters

Founders tend to obsess over the first half (how big is the market) and skip the second half (can I reach it), which is usually the half that kills the idea. A giant market you cannot reach is worse than a modest one where you know exactly where every buyer gathers.

Reachability decides your cost to acquire a customer, and that cost decides whether the economics ever work. A headline like 'everyone with a smartphone' is meaningless on its own. What matters is the reachable, addressable slice: the buyers you can find again and again through a channel you can afford. A small market with a cheap channel often beats a huge one with no way in.

How it affects your recommendation

Adequate size paired with strong reachability pulls the recommendation up, because it answers a question founders usually leave for later: how will customers actually find you.

A market that is large but diffuse, with no obvious channel, caps the score and pushes the report toward proving a channel before building. When the market is genuinely small, the report asks whether the price can be high enough to make a small number of customers worth serving. Few buyers at a high ticket can be a real business; many buyers you cannot afford to reach usually is not.

Example

Compare 'an app for everyone who cooks' with 'inventory software for independent coffee roasters.' The first names a market of hundreds of millions and a way to reach almost none of them affordably. The second names maybe a few thousand businesses in the country, but they cluster in the same trade forums, the same conferences, and the same equipment suppliers, so you can reach nearly all of them for very little. The smaller, reachable market is the better business, because you can find your customers without burning the budget to do it.