In college, I interned at a MarTech company that sold email marketing optimization software. With their software, brands could finally gain visibility into their email program’s deliverability rate or inbox placement, which most email service providers, like Constant Contact or MailChimp, can’t do.
The business’ largest revenue stream was a channel partner program that enabled email service providers to sell my old company’s software to their own customers. And one day, at an all-hands meeting, our CEO showed us a slide that listed every single email service provider we partnered with and the amount of customers they all had.
He told us this was our total addressable market. Then, he showed us a slide of how much of the market we had captured — it was a single digit percentage. Even though we generated $100 million in revenue per year, we were shocked at how little of the market we had secured. But it also helped us realize that we still had plenty of room to grow, which motivated us to win as much of the market as possible.