Of all the slides in a pitch deck, the Market Size slide is what potential investors use as a make-or-break decision. Our "Total Addressable Market" (which is often referred to as the "TAM Slide") is how we calculate the market size of our opportunity. Yet how we present the market size slide and how we do market sizing takes a special approach.

Why do Investors Care about Market Size Slides?

The one rate-limiting factor for a startup is the total addressable market. A startup cannot scale to a size that exceeds the number of potential customers it has in an overall market. Therefore, if an investor can easily see that the total market size for our business is $50 million, then they know even if we had zero competition, we could be no more th...