Don't fight for the biggest markets. Own the forgotten ones.
A market twenty times smaller does not make its winner twenty times smaller. Why we build for the trades nobody else builds for.
Restaurants are a huge market. That's why Toast exists.
Law is huge and lucrative. That's why Legora exists.
Knowledge work is enormous. That's why there are a thousand tools for it.
We don't need any of those markets. On purpose.
Size is not the whole story
Take restaurants and caterers. Say, for the sake of the argument, that restaurants are twenty times the software opportunity.
That does not mean the best restaurant software company is worth twenty times the best catering one.
In restaurants, you fight dozens of well-funded competitors for a few percent of the market, and prices get pushed down every year. In catering, if nobody has built the obvious product yet, the one that does can become the default for most of the trade, and keep the pricing power that comes with it.
A market can be much smaller while the prize for the winner is surprisingly close.
There are hundreds of these
Caterers. Padel clubs. Private museums. Escape rooms. Equestrian centers. Diving schools. Wedding venues. Dance schools. Martial arts schools. Yacht charters. Climbing gyms. Sports academies. Campsites. Cooking schools. Event agencies. Art galleries. Music schools.
Every one of them is a real economy, with real businesses, real complexity and real money changing hands. Every one of them is running on spreadsheets and a generic tool.
Nobody will raise a giant round to build the best software in the world for diving schools. The market is too small to fund a whole software company.
That's exactly why it's available.
The strategy
So the question isn't "which market is biggest?" It's:
Which trades are big enough to matter, and too small for anyone else to bother?
Then become the default there.
One of them doesn't make a big company. But when the cost of building for a new trade drops, you can do it for ten, then fifty, then hundreds. The long tail, added up, is larger than the head.
Why we can do it and others can't
A classic vertical software company pays the full price for every trade: its own team, its own infrastructure, years of work before the product is good.
We pay that price once. Records, workflows, permissions, finance, scheduling and agents are shared across every industry we serve. What we build per trade is what makes that trade different: its vocabulary, its objects, its rules. And each new trade makes the shared foundation better for the next.
That's how a trade that could never fund its own software company still gets software that feels made for it.
Running a business in a trade software forgot? We'd like to hear about it.
