Is the startup you're building big or cool enough?
I think about this a lot.
Is WinOptix is a big enough idea? Is my target market big enough? Is the concept interesting or impactful enough?
A lot of this "big enough" doubt comes from reading a lot of tech and startup news.
"Startup X raises $50 million dollars and now is worth $2 billion."
"Startup Y has $100 million in revenue with no marketing."
"Startup Z goes public, the stock pops, and the company is now worth $5 billion."
I need to stop reading all of crap.
The fact of the matter is that I don't know if WinOptix is big enough yet.
Yeah, the government contracting market is really big, like trillions of dollars big. But at the moment, I'm only targeting IT service providers, which is much smaller.
Can the product be eventually sold to other types of government contractors, or additional markets outside of govcon, so that the market gets much larger? Maybe. But I don't know. I'm not there yet.
Here's a post from Rob Go of NextView Ventures that talks about the "market size fallacy" for seed stage startups. That post makes me feel better every time I read it. It basically says, "you don't know until you find out."
And the product is in such an early phase that I don't know if it will be cool or impactful enough.
There's been a good amount of interest from prospective customers and partners. Industry experts believe in the concept and like what they see in the product. But I won't really know how impactful the product will be until I get more paying customers.
There's a lot of things I don't know. But that's OK.
So if you're not sure how big your market is or how impactful your product is, that's OK too.
Maybe your company isn't venture scale. Maybe it is. So what?
Maybe your product is in a boring industry. Or maybe it's in a hot sector like AI or blockchain. So what?
It's tough to stop having FOMO, but it's necessary. It's hard not to think about chasing the shiny object. I think about cooler technologies and products all the time. But it just takes my focus away from what's important.
So is the startup you're building big or cool enough? Don't worry about it, it probably doesn't matter.