Where to Play Next: Sizing a Market and Finding the Whitespace Around Your Product

Every growth plan reaches the same question: where do we play next? It might be a new industry, a new country, an adjacent category, or a new buyer role. The usual answer starts from a top-down market figure, a large number that is true and hard to act on, and ends with a slide that cannot say how many companies could buy, how many vendors already sell to them, or whether any of those buyers are unhappy.

Meanwhile the field keeps filling up. G2 added more than 17,000 new products to its marketplace in the year to June 2024, and the marketplace grew more than 10% year over year.[1] The vendors already in place hold an edge too: in G2's 2024 survey of more than 1,900 software buyers, most said they would rather renew a product than switch to another vendor.[2]

This post sets out a method that starts from the product you sell: define the market narrowly, size it from the companies in it, rank where incumbents leave room, and compare two candidates before you commit budget.

Size the market you can count, company by company. Then look for the room inside it.

Step 1: Define the market you would actually sell into

Start from the categories your product competes in, not the biggest category it touches. Then narrow on three axes: the industries you can serve, the countries you can sell and support in, and the buyer roles that sign. Each cut is a decision, and each one should rest on evidence:

• Categories: how big each category is, how fast it grows, the sources behind the estimate, and who leads it.
• Industries: the average deal size, the sales cycle, and the buying committee by company size, so you know what selling there takes.
• Countries: the rules a software seller must follow, data residency, the channel partners, and the local vendors you would meet.
• Roles: software spend per seat, seats by company size, and the target buyers and signing authority for the role that buys.

The cuts matter to buyers as well. Vertical industry categories drew the most buyer traffic on G2 in the year to June 2024, with 1,572,493 unique pageviews.[1] In Gartner Digital Markets' 2024 survey of 2,499 software buyers, 21% named a local vendor based in their own country among the reasons they chose the vendor for their latest purchase, and 72% said product information in their own language is extremely or very important.[3]

In PYRAMYD: the Categories, Industries, Countries, and Roles modules in the Markets hub hold these profiles. Market 360 then turns your cuts into a saved definition: one to five categories, up to five industries, countries, and roles each, and the product you sell as the offering, shared with your team.

Step 2: Size it by counting companies

Total, serviceable, and obtainable market are three nested questions. The total addressable market is the whole revenue opportunity for what you sell, if you won every customer; the serviceable market is the part your business model, geography, and ideal customer profile can reach; and the obtainable market is the share of that you can realistically win, given your competitive position, resources, and go-to-market capacity.[4]

The bottom-up way to size a market is to count. Find the companies that match your ideal customer profile, estimate what each is worth to you, and add them up.[4] HG Insights' guide advises using both top-down and bottom-up approaches to validate a market size.[5] Counting has a practical advantage: every number has names behind it, so you can check a sample, hand the list to sales, and see how much of it you already cover.

In PYRAMYD: the TAM · SAM · SOM card on a saved market's Overview and Scale tabs counts the companies in the total and serviceable market. For the obtainable market it counts the named accounts that match the definition and do not yet own a product in its categories, and once at least three won deals are on record it adds obtainable revenue based on your median won deal. The card shows its method and assumptions. Without an offering on the definition, the third figure is coverage-gap accounts rather than an obtainable share, so name the product you sell. For the top-down check, a category's Market tab gives its size and growth over time, by segment, region, and industry, as estimates with their sources and a confidence level.

Step 3: Rank where incumbents leave room

A large serviceable market full of entrenched vendors is a worse bet than a smaller one where buyers outnumber sellers and complain about what they have. HG Insights' guide makes the same point about sizing: a segment already dominated by a strong competitor may not belong in your serviceable market at all, and accounts held by an incumbent you would struggle to displace belong outside your obtainable one.[5]

The simplest test of room is demand per vendor. Here is that arithmetic for three categories in the Sales Software market, from the graph on 8 October 2026, with review counts as a rough stand-in for buyer demand:

CRM Software held 1,442 products from 1,360 vendors, with 211,182 reviews between them. Sales Compensation Software held 75 products from 69 vendors and 25,116 reviews. CRM has 8.4 times the reviews but 19.7 times the vendors, so per vendor, Sales Compensation has 2.3 times the reviews. Sales Engagement Software held 27,395 reviews across 109 vendors. You can open all three as sample pages: CRM, Sales Engagement, and Sales Compensation.

Review counts are a blunt measure. They are totals, not a trend; they lean toward categories whose buyers write reviews; and they say nothing about satisfaction. Treat them as a first screen, then look at who the reviewers are and how satisfied they are inside your market.

In PYRAMYD: the Competitive whitespace card on a market's Competition tab runs the same kind of arithmetic, buyer demand per vendor, inside the market you defined, and adds the satisfaction gaps of the reviewers in it. It ranks up to eight categories, each with its buyer demand, vendor count, and whitespace score, and it leaves out cells too thin to score rather than guessing. Around it, a country's Landscape tab lists the local vendors and how crowded each category is there, and an industry's Landscape tab lists its leaders, emerging players, and barriers to entry.

Step 4: Compare two candidates before you commit

Never decide on one market alone. Define the runner-up the same way and set the two side by side: serviceable companies, obtainable accounts and revenue, the top whitespace categories, and the rules and buyers you would face in each. Two markets compare fairly only when they were defined the same way, with the same offering, the same kind of cuts, and the same method. A market defined with three countries will look smaller than one defined with a whole region, and that difference says nothing about the opportunity.

Then write down the decision, its assumptions, and the evidence that would change it: a sizing figure you expect to move, a rival you expect to arrive, and a segment whose win rate you will watch.

In PYRAMYD: the Compare button on a saved market's page sets another saved market beside it, and first checks whether the pair can be compared at all, naming each mismatch in definition scope, offering set, formula version, or score units. Market scores on the eight dimensions are not available yet, so for now read the two markets' sizing and whitespace cards next to each other, and use the Compare check to confirm the definitions match.

Choose the market you can name

The next market is rarely the biggest one on the slide. It is the one where you can name the companies, count the vendors already selling to them, see where their buyers are unhappy, and explain why your product wins there. Run the four steps for two candidates, keep the brief, and redo the sizing when you refresh the evidence.