The market you choose to serve is one of the most important factors for an early-stage startup. And for most technologists, it’s a blind spot.

If you are going to show a market size number, I would strongly encourage you to have thoughtful answers to these two questions: how many customers? and how much will they pay?

Where you are on the curve informs your sales strategy. If you have hundreds of high-value customers, you can afford to spend a lot on sales, implementation and customer success to make sure those customers remain happy.

Most mass-scale consumer apps are, by necessity, free (and either monetized via ads or, increasingly, optional subscriptions). For these apps, the primary question I ask myself is “how big can this get?”