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Skip or Ship — Glossary
Serviceable Addressable Market
Serviceable addressable market (SAM) is the portion of total addressable market you could actually sell to given your business model, geography, language, regulation and target segment — TAM minus everyone you structurally cannot serve.
Competition
How crowded is the space for this exact outcome?
Execution
Can a focused team ship a credible first version quickly?
Revenue path
Is there a believable way to monetize early?
Customer clarity
Do you know exactly who owns this pain day to day?
Market · also known as SAM
Serviceable addressable market (SAM) is the portion of total addressable market you could actually sell to given your business model, geography, language, regulation and target segment — TAM minus everyone you structurally cannot serve.
What Serviceable Addressable Market means in practice
SAM applies the constraints TAM deliberately ignores. If your product is English-only, non-English buyers leave the number. If you sell self-serve, enterprises requiring procurement and security review leave it. If regulation limits you to one jurisdiction, everyone outside it leaves. What remains is the market your business as currently designed can actually address.
The gap between TAM and SAM is diagnostic rather than disappointing. A SAM that is a tiny fraction of TAM tells you most of the theoretical opportunity is locked behind constraints — and each constraint is a strategic choice you could revisit. Adding a language, a compliance certification or a sales motion converts locked TAM into SAM, and knowing which unlock is largest is genuinely useful roadmap information.
Because SAM depends on how your business is built rather than on the market alone, two companies in the same category can have very different SAMs from an identical TAM. That is a feature of the metric, not a flaw.
How it is calculated
SAM = TAM × (share of buyers reachable given model, geography, segment and regulation)Apply each constraint explicitly and separately so you can see which one is costing you the most reachable market.
Worked example
The £15.1m UK accounting-compliance TAM, narrowed by product constraints.
- Start from TAM: £15.1m (4,200 practices × £3,600).
- Product integrates only with Xero, used by roughly 55% of that segment: 2,310 practices.
- Self-serve onboarding excludes the ~15% requiring bespoke procurement: ~1,964 practices.
- SAM = 1,964 × £3,600 = £7.1m per year.
Takeaway: SAM is under half of TAM, and the single biggest constraint is the Xero-only integration. That makes adding a second accounting integration a quantified roadmap decision rather than a guess.
Common mistakes
- Treating SAM as an arbitrary percentage of TAM instead of deriving it from named constraints.
- Forgetting that SAM changes when the product changes — it is not a fixed property of the market.
- Excluding buyers who are merely hard to reach rather than genuinely unreachable; difficulty belongs in SOM.
- Applying overlapping constraints twice and understating the result.
Related tool: TAM/SAM/SOM calculator.
Related terms
- Total Addressable Market — Total addressable market (TAM) is the total annual revenue available if a product achieved 100% market share of everyone who could conceivably buy it — the theoretical ceiling, not a realistic target.
- Serviceable Obtainable Market — Serviceable obtainable market (SOM) is the share of your serviceable addressable market you could realistically capture within a defined period, given your budget, team, distribution and existing competition.
- Go-to-Market Strategy — A go-to-market strategy is the plan for reaching and selling to a specific customer segment — covering who you target, the channels you use, how you price, and the sales motion that converts interest into revenue.
Direct answer
The Skip or Ship Idea Lifecycle System evaluates ideas with five consistent signals: market demand, competition intensity, execution difficulty, revenue potential, and customer clarity. Same inputs, same verdict — every time.
What to prove first
One buyer segment with recurring pain and a clear trigger to pay now. If that is vague, validation can't fix it.
What kills momentum
Generic ICPs, vague outcomes, and zero distribution plan. These collapse execution speed within weeks.
What to decide next
One channel, one wedge use case, one pricing hypothesis to test in the next 14 days.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SAM and SOM?
SAM is everyone you could serve given how your business is built. SOM is the slice of SAM you could realistically win within a few years given your budget, team and the competition already in the market.
How do I calculate SAM accurately?
List each constraint that structurally excludes buyers — integration coverage, geography, language, regulation, sales motion — and apply them one at a time to your TAM. Naming them separately shows which constraint costs you the most market.
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