WinPicking Your Market
Let’s say you have read the VSKP and are convinced—you want to build a vertical SaaS company. The next logical question is what market you should pick.
Let’s say you have read the VSKP and are convinced—you want to build a vertical SaaS company. The next logical question is what market you should pick. The ideal SMB vertical should be:
To kickstart this analysis for you, we set out to study which industries are both big and dominated by SMBs. (We will save fragmentation up and down the value chain for another day.) The government's business census (released in 2020, from 2017) provided the requisite data.
In the chart below, I mapped industries at the 4-digit NAICS level. (There is a perpetual argument around which level of classification is best, but we used the 4-digit for today’s exercise.) Here's how to read the chart:
At Tidemark, we try to open-source our thinking as much as possible to help founders win; however, as investors, we can’t give everything away in public. If you’re an operator or founder, you can request access to the rest of this piece below.
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