TL;DR
Size the zone you will actually sell to in the next 12 to 24 months, not the one you dream of reaching. "The whole world" gives a huge number that supports no decision, while a country or a region gives one you can plan against. Pick the zone first, then pick one currency and keep it.
Size the zone you will actually serve in the next 12 to 24 months, not the one you hope to reach one day. "The whole world" is not an addressable market: it produces a very large number that tells you nothing about what to do on Monday. A country, a region or a city produces a smaller number you can plan against.
Why "the whole world" is not a market
When you ask a founder where they sell, the answer is often "everywhere, it's online". Technically true. Anyone with a browser can land on your page.
But a market is not the people who could find you. It is the people you can reach, convince and serve, with the product, the language and the hours you have today. For most solo founders, that is a lot smaller than the planet.
A market drawn too wide does two kinds of damage:
- It inflates every number that follows. Revenue potential, the share of the market you think you need, the plan built on top of it. All of it inherits the error.
- It hides the real work. "Global" sounds like a strategy. In practice it means no channel, no language and no customer in particular.
You will not catch the problem by looking at the big number, because the big number looks great. That is precisely the issue.
The question to ask: where will you sell in the next 24 months?
Forget where you would like to be in five years. Ask where you will actually sell over the next 12 to 24 months, and place yourself on one of four levels:
- Local. A city or a region. Typical for anything sold in person, or where trust is built face to face.
- One country. One language, one legal framework, one way of paying.
- A region of the world. Several countries you can genuinely serve: Europe, North America, the Spanish-speaking world.
- The world. Only if you can honestly sell and support everywhere, from day one.
To check your level, run through a few concrete questions:
- Language. In which languages are your product, your site and your support written today?
- Payment. Can a customer in that zone pay you easily, in a currency they expect?
- Reach. Which channels can you actually work in that zone, given your time?
- Support. Can you answer customers there during their working hours?
- Rules. Are there local obligations (invoicing, data, regulated activities) you already handle?
Each "no" pulls you down one level. Most projects built by one person land on local or one country, sometimes a region. That is not a lack of ambition. It is the zone you can win first.
A worked example: one product, three zones
Take a scheduling and reminder tool for independent physiotherapists, sold at €30 a month. The product, its site and its support are in one language only. All the counts below are invented for the example.
Zone 1, the whole world. Suppose there are 400,000 independent physiotherapists worldwide.
400,000 × €30 × 12 months = €144,000,000 a year
Zone 2, the one country whose language the product speaks. Suppose that country has 40,000 of them.
40,000 × €30 × 12 months = €14,400,000 a year
The world figure is 144,000,000 ÷ 14,400,000 = 10 times larger, and the extra nine-tenths are people who cannot read your product, cannot get support from you and will never see your marketing.
Zone 3, one region, because the founder sells by visiting practices. No one publishes a count of independent physiotherapists for that region. So you estimate it from the national figure and say so. Suppose the region holds 15% of the country's population.
40,000 × 15% = 6,000 physiotherapists (estimate, scaled from the national figure)
6,000 × €30 × 12 months = €2,160,000 a year
Now the world figure is 144,000,000 ÷ 2,160,000 ≈ 67 times the zone the founder will actually work. Same product, same price, same founder.
Which one is right? The one that matches how the founder will sell over the next 24 months. If it is door to door in one region, it is zone 3, and €2.16 million a year is the honest ceiling to plan against. If the founder sells online across the whole country, it is zone 2. The world figure is never the answer for this project, however good it looks on a slide.
Notice what the regional estimate needed: one national figure, one share, and a label saying it is an estimate. Local data rarely exists. That is not a reason to fall back on the world. It is a reason to scale down carefully and say how you did it.
Pick one currency and keep it
Once the zone is set, pick the currency your customers will pay in and use it everywhere: prices, costs, market figures, projections.
Converting back and forth between currencies adds a moving exchange rate to numbers that are already uncertain. A market figure found in dollars and a price set in euros can be compared, but only if you convert once, write down the rate and never convert again. Simpler still: think in the currency of the zone you serve.
What investors actually look at
If you are tempted to keep the big number for a pitch, it may not help as much as you think. Investors from Felicis, Upfront and Lux have said market size is not among their first criteria; what they look at is the reasoning behind the number (TechCrunch, 2022).
A zone you can defend, with an estimate you can explain, says more about you than a billion-dollar total copied from somewhere.
What this does not cover
Choosing the zone does not tell you how many potential customers it holds. You still need to count them, and to count the right people: the ones who pay, not just the ones who use the product. That question comes first, and it is covered in who actually pays for your app.
It does not tell you how many customers you need either. That depends on your costs and what each customer leaves you, which is a separate calculation.
And it is not a permanent decision. The zone is a bet on the next 12 to 24 months. When you add a language, a channel or a way to support customers elsewhere, widen it and redo the numbers.
How Banast does it
The first chapter of a Banast report asks where you will sell in the next twelve to twenty-four months, on four levels: local, country, region of the world, world. It also asks for the currency of the report. The instruction shown is plain: the zone you will really serve, not the one you aim for one day, because that is the zone that gets sized.
Local figures rarely exist, so Banast estimates them from national ones and says so. The currency is locked as soon as the search for market figures starts, and it is never converted for display.
FAQ
My product is online. Isn't my market automatically global?
Anyone can find it, but that is not the same as you being able to sell to them. Your language, your support hours, the way people pay and the channels you can actually work all narrow the zone. Size the people you can realistically reach and serve, not everyone with an internet connection.
What if I plan to expand abroad in year two?
Then size the zone you serve today and treat expansion as a separate decision with its own numbers. If expansion is part of the next 24 months for real, with a translated product and a way to reach those customers, include it. If it is a wish, leave it out.
There is no data for my city or region. What do I do?
Start from the national figure and scale it down, for example by the region's share of the population, and say clearly that it is an estimate. A labelled estimate is useful. An unlabelled one is a trap for whoever reads it later, including you.
Adrien Lebas
Founder of Banast, building it alone from Avignon. Writes about what it takes to make a living from what you build.