When no category exists, there is no market to size — so diligence the problem instead. Establish who has it, what they currently spend working around it, and whose budget a solution would come from. A problem with no existing workaround spend is usually a problem nobody is paying to solve.
What do you do without a market?
Stop trying to size it. A top-down estimate of a category that does not exist produces a number with no basis, and investment committees have learned to discount them heavily. A bottom-up build is the only defensible alternative.
What is knowable is the problem: who has it, how acute it is, and what they currently do about it. Those are observable today.
- 01
Find who has it
Identify people with the problem today, not people who find the product interesting.
- 02
Price the workaround
Establish what they currently spend solving it badly.
- 03
Name the budget
Work out whose line a solution would come from.
- 04
Test with the holder
Ask that budget holder whether they agree it is a problem worth paying for.
How do you diligence the problem?
By finding people who have it and establishing what they currently spend working around it. Manual effort, spreadsheets, an outsourced team, a consultant — all of it is spend, all of it is a signal, and a short survey will size it across the segment.
Workaround spend is revealed preference rather than stated interest, which is why it predicts better than enthusiasm does.
Workaround spend also has the useful property of being describable by the person paying it. Nobody has to estimate a market or forecast adoption; they only have to say what they currently do and roughly what it costs them, which is a question people answer accurately because it is about their own operations rather than about the future.
Whose budget would this come from?
The critical question, and the one most often skipped. A solution has to displace something in someone's budget, and identifying whose changes both the go-to-market and the diligence — which is also the test a corporate investor applies internally.
Where nobody can name the budget line, that is usually the finding rather than an information gap.
An absent budget line is also a finding with a timeline attached. Categories acquire budgets eventually, and establishing whether this one is two years away or five is a different question from whether the problem is real — and it is the one that decides whether the investment is early or simply wrong.
| Market sizing | Problem diligence | |
|---|---|---|
| Requires | Category data, comparables, analyst coverage | People with the problem and a budget line |
| Produces | A number with no basis | A characterization of existing workaround spend |
| Survives an IC | Rarely | More often, because it can be interrogated |
What are people doing instead?
Something, almost always. Problems acute enough to build a company around are rarely being ignored; they are being handled badly at a cost somebody is already bearing.
Characterizing that cost is the closest available substitute for a market size, and it is more defensible because it is built from observed behavior.
What people are doing instead also tells you what the product has to beat rather than what it has to be. A solution competing with a spreadsheet and a competent analyst faces a different bar from one competing with an outsourced team on a contract, and the two imply different pricing, different positioning and different sales cycles.
What counts as a real signal?
A named budget, a timeline, and a person who owns the problem. Enthusiasm from someone who would not be the buyer is a signal about the problem, not about the company — which is why discovery calls go to budget holders rather than to users.
The gap between those two is where most pre-category theses fail, and it is detectable in diligence if the questions are aimed at the budget rather than at the product.