First, go back and rethink whether it is the right market for you. If your analysis shows that the market size is just $100M, then your revenue potential can, at best, be as high as $10-20M.  This might be due to a small market audience or an early-stage market. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it likely means there isn’t potential for venture-sized returns, and you might need to consider alternative investment routes besides VCs.

If you are convinced this is the market for you, you will then need to demonstrate to investors why there is significant value left to be extracted. Here are three strategies:

🟠 Strategy #1 is to expand your addressable audience. For example, if your addressable audience is too small, one option is to increase the average spend. FLipDeal.com, a discount publisher, targeted parents but found that the kids had an equally high budget – thus, they got an opportunity to attract both parents and kids by creating a compelling offering. Alternatively you might wanna start your pricing or start adding new features that boost the average spend. 

🟢 Strategy #2 is to expand into adjacent verticals. For instance, if you’re launching an AI product for health professionals and find the market too small, consider if the exact same product could be useful in other fields (e.g., mental health, physical health, wellness, and fitness). In this way, your originally identified market (what we call the Serviceable Available Market [SAM]) becomes part of a larger Total Addressable Market (TAM) that you could leverage to grow its reach. You can read up more on market sizes here.

🟣 Strategy #3 is to think at least five years forward when considering your market: if you can show that the market is small now because the product hasn’t existed before, then try to project out how big it could be in future. Take Uber, for example. When they first pitched, the US ride-hailing and limo market was just $4B. However, by demonstrating the potential market (the entire US population) and estimating future spending (e.g., if each person spent $10 on Uber monthly), they projected a $39B TAM in the US alone. That vision became a reality.