TAM Limited by Imagination

One point in Alex Bouaziz's hyperscale playbook: your total addressable market is limited by your imagination, not by the market itself.¹

Explanation

"If you get to product-market fit on your first product, there are so many adjacent products and ecosystems you can build. When an investor tells you your TAM is too small, they're usually wrong." Bouaziz calls it probably the worst answer an investor can give a founder, because strong product-market fit generates adjacencies on its own, since customers who love a product want to do more with the company that built it. His own example of unforeseen expansion, offered lightly: Boom Technology using its turbine technology to power data centers, definitely not something in the original fundraising deck.¹

Deel's own path is the proof. Contractors, then employer of record, then running payroll, then payroll infrastructure, then HR tools, then performance, then learning, then immigration, each adjacency compounding onto the last.¹

Focus first, then expand, is the sequencing. The point is not to boil the ocean early. Bouaziz: "the most important thing is: if you can get at the very beginning clear customers that love your product, one, two, three, ten, twenty, your market is fine. Then you can go into addressing things." Imagination-bound TAM is the later move that a nailed first product earns; it presupposes rather than replaces a singular early focus. He is candid that he did not foresee contractors as a beachhead into employer-of-record services when he started; he simply knew the first market was large enough.¹

How to reframe it for investors. Two levers matter. First, run the math on the current product: this is how much is charged per unit, this is how many units are in the market, is that really small; Deel's own version has roughly one and a half million people currently paid on the platform, so growth to ten million is a straightforward ten-x of current revenue. Second, take a take rate rather than only a software fee: the largest markets appear when a company is doing the underlying thing itself and earning a percentage of it, foreign exchange, a portion of wages, literally acting as the employer of record rather than only selling software around the edges of that function. AI increasingly makes it easier to absorb these operational, previously low-margin services directly, which is the mechanism that turns an imagined adjacency into a genuinely large revenue market rather than merely a large logo count.¹

The synthesis: your market is too small usually decodes into two separate problems, the initial product's addressable market genuinely is small, and the founder is doing a poor job telling the story of how it grows as new products are added. The fix has to address both.

Why it matters

It is a direct counter to the reflexive venture objection about market size, and it gives a founder mental permission to build a platform rather than a single feature, while the nail one product first clause keeps it from licensing premature sprawl. Paired with the take-rate point, it also distinguishes a genuinely large market, where the company monetizes the flow itself, from a merely large user count, where the company sells inexpensive software to many people without ever capturing a meaningful share of the value moving through them.

Tensions and open questions

Focus first, then expand is the entire difficulty and is hard to time in practice; expanding one product too early is exactly the failure mode this concept is meant to guard against, and no crisp test for product-market fit achieved, now expand is offered. There is also selection bias built into the framing, since it comes from a founder whose adjacencies happened to work. Plenty of imagination-bound TAM pitches are simply small markets dressed up with good decks, and the take-rate test, does the company actually monetize the flow, is the more reliable, harder-nosed filter for telling the two apart.