The Pie is Bigger Than You Think It Is

While moving in small and large entrepreneurial circles for a couple decades, I’ve seen a lot of the same questions get asked over and over. One of the most common is people asking if there is enough room in the marketplace for their idea/product/service.

People want to know: “Is the pie big enough for my idea?”

I CAN IMAGINE QUITE A BIT

— HAN SOLO

Almost everyone asks this question, and we’re all afraid the answer is “no.” Creators are often scared everything has already been thought of, every product invented, every service offered, every song sung, every story told. Pretty much by definition, people are terrible at knowing what they don’t know, and we are particularly bad at grasping large numbers and complex systems. Anyone who would actually answer this question, “no” is either ignorant (common), lacking imagination (common), or protecting their own slice of the pie (also common).

Here’s an example from my own personal life from just the other week:

I came across a German company called SAP. I’d never heard of them before. I’m almost forty and consider myself pretty successful in my marketing/tech/business career. I’ve worked with lots of different sizes of companies, from mom and pop shops, to startups, to fortune 100 brands we all come across multiple times a day. I have the respect of my peers, generate a good living, and all that. I had no idea who or what SAP was.

Well, SAP does logistics around payroll and data for big businesses. They grossed 27 billion dollars in revenue last year. 3.3 billion of that was profit. There’s no reason I should have heard of them or know about them. It’s not my area. But this company I’ve never heard of has a 27 BILLION dollar piece of a pie that I didn’t even know existed until last week.

At that moment, I gained a critical piece of perspective on what I don’t know. There’s still plenty I don’t, obviously, but it shined a lot on the scale of my ignorance.