How do I research whether a market is big enough to matter but small enough that big players will ignore it?
You're looking for the sweet spot that's a real business for you but a rounding error for a giant, and the test is simple: could this market ever produce revenue a large incumbent would bother chasing. If the whole addressable spend is a few crore a year, the big players stay away and you can own it; if it's clearly heading toward hundreds of crore, expect company soon. Size it bottom-up honestly, because the danger cuts both ways: too small starves you, too obviously large invites the fight you were trying to avoid.
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Jason Cohen names the exact mechanism you are trying to size: a big company has a materiality threshold (it needs a new line to clear tens of millions before it is worth a team's attention), so a niche throwing off a million a year is invisible to it and wide open to you. He gives you the number to reason with, not just the vibe. Read it as a lens for judging whether your target sits under that threshold on purpose, not by accident.
Thiel makes the counterintuitive case that dominating a tiny market first is a feature, not a bug: every lasting monopoly started by owning a small niche completely, then expanded outward from that base (Amazon started with books, Facebook with one campus). For a founder being told their market is too niche, this reframes the niche as the beachhead you win before you grow. We link the Penguin India edition since it is the real, easy-to-buy version for founders here.
Start small and own a specific market fully before expanding, and err on the side of starting too small rather than too broad.
A defensible niche you can dominate beats a large market where you are one of many, because the point is to be the only real option, not one of the crowd.
The plan matters: expand from your small market into adjacent ones deliberately, so "niche" is a starting position, not a ceiling.
Arvid Kahl bootstrapped and sold a SaaS solo, and now publishes the most practical ongoing guidance for one-person and small-team businesses, audience-building, leverage, and staying profitable and sane.
