Everyone Is Not Your Customer
The biggest lie founders tell themselves. If everyone needs your product, no one needs your product. Finding the people who have a real problem—and will pay to solve it—is harder than it sounds.
There’s a question every investor asks early in a meeting. You’ve barely sat down, still adjusting the laptop, and they lean back with this look, like they already know what you’re about to say, and they ask it. “Who is your customer?”
And almost every founder, everywhere in the world, but especially in Bangladesh, gives the same answer.
“Everyone.”
I’ve heard it in Dhaka. I’ve heard it in Singapore. In rooms with chandeliers and rooms with bad fluorescent lighting. Founders say it with complete confidence, like it’s a strength. And the investor nods, writes something in their notebook, and the meeting dies right there, even if neither side knows it yet.
I know this because I was one of those founders. And I know what it costs.
A couple of years ago, I was having breakfast with a French billionaire at the St. Regis in Singapore. Holdings in fintech, real estate, energy, biotech. The kind of person who doesn’t measure opportunity in ideas, but in scalable infrastructure. Over eggs and coffee, he asked me how big my market was. I told him about the population, the GDP growth, the mobile internet explosion. All the things you put on slide three. He listened. Then he put down his coffee.
“That’s not a market. That’s a country.”
He wasn’t being dismissive. He was being precise. A country is not a market. A market is a specific group of people with a specific problem who have the money and motivation to pay for a specific solution. Confusing the two is how founders build products for 170 million people that only 50,000 ever use.
What he was really asking me about was TAM, SAM, and SOM. Three layers of market reality that every founder should know cold, not because investors want to hear them, but because getting this wrong is how you build the wrong product for the wrong people and run out of money wondering what happened.
TAM: The Number That Lies to You
TAM, the Total Addressable Market, is the biggest number. The entire universe of demand if you somehow captured every customer who could possibly use your product. If you’re in ride-hailing, TAM is every person alive who sometimes needs to get somewhere. The number is enormous and completely useless for actually running your business.
TAM tells you whether an industry is worth entering at all. But TAM being large doesn’t mean your opportunity is large. It just means the category has room. You still have to fight your way to a piece of it.
WeWork understood this the hard way. Their TAM pitch was seductive: hundreds of millions of office workers globally, a multi-trillion dollar commercial real estate market, the entire future of work. Investors poured in $47 billion at peak valuation. But strip away the narrative and the SAM was far thinner. Flexible co-working appealed to a narrow slice of freelancers, early-stage startups, and remote workers in premium urban markets. That’s not a bad business. It was never a $47 billion business. When valuation met reality during the 2019 IPO attempt, the whole thing collapsed. The French billionaire would have asked one question and seen it coming: “But who is actually paying, and how many of them are there?”
SAM: Where Honesty Starts
SAM, the Serviceable Addressable Market, is where honesty starts. It’s the slice of TAM you could theoretically reach given your geography, product capabilities, price point, and distribution. What language is my product in? What device does it require? What income level does it assume? What cultural behaviors does it depend on? Every filter removes a chunk of your TAM, and founders hate this because watching the number shrink feels like losing.
It isn’t losing. It’s locating yourself.
In Bangladesh, the SAM calculation is particularly brutal if you’re honest. The headline is seductive: 170 million people, one of the youngest populations in Asia, smartphone adoption exploding. You put those numbers in a deck and investors lean forward. But run the filter and the picture changes quickly. How many can afford to pay for a tech service regularly? How many have consistent data access? How many are in urban areas where digital commerce functions? How many have a bank account or mobile wallet?
Run those numbers and 170 million starts looking like 5 million. In Dhaka specifically, a city of 20 million that every founder uses as their core market, the actual addressable segment for a consumer tech product sits somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 people. Not 20 million. Not even 2 million.
That morning at the St. Regis, the French billionaire already knew this. “Of those 170 million people,” he asked, “how many earn more than $10,000 a year?” I did the math in my head. Maybe 5 million. He nodded. “Those are your customers. The people ordering food delivery three times a week. Using ride-hailing daily. Complaining about traffic from air-conditioned cars. That’s your market.” Then he said something that landed harder: “In India, that same segment is 100 million people. Twenty times larger. So why would I invest in Bangladesh when I can invest there?”
I didn’t have an answer.
SOM: The Number That Actually Runs Your Business
SOM, the Serviceable Obtainable Market, goes further. It’s the share of your SAM you can realistically capture given competition, resources, and time. If your SAM is 5 million and you’re a seed-stage company with 15 people, you’re not getting 5 million customers anytime soon. SOM is the planning number. The one that makes your financial model real instead of theoretical.
The mistake isn’t misunderstanding these terms. Most founders can define them. The mistake is in the calculation. TAM is easy because it’s just math. SAM requires honesty. SOM gets skipped entirely because it’s uncomfortable.
How the Best Companies Started Small on Purpose
Airbnb’s initial target wasn’t everyone who travels. It was attendees of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, where hotels were sold out and thousands of people needed somewhere to sleep. Their initial SOM was effectively a few hundred people. That absurdly small focus is what let them learn fast enough to eventually reimagine how the world travels.
Uber launched in San Francisco. Not the United States. One city. High-income professionals with notoriously bad taxi access, smartphones, and credit cards. One customer type, one problem. Expansion came after the model was proven.
Amazon started with books. One category, one customer type: people who read enough that local bookstore selection was limiting. Bezos identified a structural advantage online, served that customer with precision, then used the machine he built to expand into everything else. The constraint was the strategy.
The Bangladesh Trap: Why “Going Big” Is the Wrong Instinct
There is a particular kind of ambition in Bangladeshi business culture that I both admire and find dangerous. The ambition of a people who have survived floods, famines, partition, and political chaos and still built one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia. The instinct is to go big. To reach everyone. Saying “my customer is 200,000 people” sounds like small thinking in a country that has fought its entire existence to be taken seriously.
But vision and market are not the same thing. Trying to serve everyone on day one doesn’t make you ambitious. It makes you unfocused. Unfocused companies burn through money without building anything durable.
There’s also a behavioral layer most founders miss. Unlike San Francisco, where early adopters self-select as people who buy new things for the status of being first, Bangladesh has a rigid social structure around consumption. The upper-middle class, maybe 3 to 5 percent of the population, behaves like tech consumers. Below that, behavior changes completely. People rely on cash. They trust relatives more than interfaces. They’re skeptical of anything that requires changing established habits without a referral from someone in their circle.
Your SAM filter in Bangladesh has to include behavior, not just income. You’re not only asking who can afford your product. You’re asking who has the readiness to adopt it. Founders resist this because it forces the kind of honesty that feels like shrinking the dream.
The dream doesn’t shrink. The target does.
The Exercise, and the Question That Ends It
Draw three columns. First: every person who could possibly benefit from your product, no filters. That’s your TAM. Second: apply every realistic constraint, geography, device, income, behavior, language, existing habits. Be ruthless. That’s your SAM. Third: your team size, budget, network, runway. What can you actually capture in the next twelve months? That’s your SOM.
If the SOM terrifies you because it’s small, you’ve done it right. A small, honest SOM means you know exactly who you’re going after. You can build for them, market to them, retain them, and expand outward from that foundation.
The French billionaire wasn’t wrong. He was just doing the math I should have done before sitting down across from him. When he asked how big my market really was, he was asking for the SAM, not the TAM. I gave him the TAM because it sounded better. He saw through it in thirty seconds because he’d heard the same pitch in twenty other countries.
Before your next pitch, before your next feature, write your SOM on a whiteboard. A real number, not a hope. Then defend it to someone who doesn’t believe in your idea. If you can’t hold that number under pressure, you don’t have a market yet.
You have a demographic.
Demographics don’t buy things. People do.
Not with everyone. With someone.