When
@timolsh and I decided to start building again, we made one non-negotiable rule: This time, it had to be a truly massive market.
Zenput, taught us that lesson the hard way. We built a great vertical SaaS business, but over time it became clear we were fighting in a ~$50M market for our core product.
So we created a simple two-pronged framework for picking any new market:
1️⃣) Whatever we build must be the single most important decision on the buyer’s plate. The one they can’t afford to get wrong right now.
2️⃣) We had to believe the business could realistically go from $0 to $100M in revenue in under 5 years.
Why these two criteria?
If you’re not solving their #1 priority, you have almost zero pricing power. Companies will happily spend millions on infrastructure, CRM, or security, but with thousands of project management tools out there, no one is paying premium prices for “just another one.”
And even if you’re critical in a small market, it’s not enough. ERP systems sit in a giant TAM, but they move so slowly that scaling from $0 to $100M in <5 years is basically impossible.
That framework is exactly how we landed on cybersecurity, a $250B annual spend market, and specifically on what we’re building at
@fencer_security , informed by our own experience scaling tech companies from the inside.