There are a lot more businessmen than politicians because any idiot can make a custom silver bullet. By custom silver bullet, I just mean that if your business has targets that are only 100 or 200, you can make something really specialized for each one you’re trying to get. That’s a custom silver bullet—something so specialized that the target just says yes to or is more likely to say yes than no.

And you don’t need thousands of customers as a B2B to hit a good revenue number. Even the power laws apply here. Most of the revenue will come from two or three clients. Even if you’re a freelancer hitting like $100K a month, it will be coming from mostly two or three retainers.

On the other hand, politicians have to have millions on their side, while businessmen just need hundreds to thousands on their side for a really high scale. So why be a businessman whose business needs millions to survive? That’s a job as hard as being a politician. And there are not many of these politicians, right? For me, to see a businessman with the characteristics of a politician—that he has millions and billions of customers—I would say that’s almost not natural. That not a natural habitat for that businessman. That’s almost a penguin somehow surviving in the Amazon. Just get your ass to Antarctica.

Because when you pass a certain threshold of people, it is really hard to hit homogeneity. A politician’s problem is a policy problem that appeases enough people that he wins.

And same problems happen to a businessman when he tries to attract too big of an audience. It stops becoming a targeted business and more like a policy problem.

Plus, if you make some go-to-market motion with really high efficacy, in targeted business you can really scale fast by using it on the rest of your TAM. But in a really, really big audience business, the efficacy of all your GTM will have really fast diminishing returns. It will decay really fast because there is no homogeneity in your customer base. So you will be reinventing the wheel all the time, while in a small TAM market—by TAM I mean the number of participants, not the size of it, okay?—you can scale that GTM motion really fast because they are all the same.

In a tight market, the GTM motion gets exponentially better as you keep applying the learnings you had as you went on. On the other hand, with mass market, each GTM motion gets refined and then plummets because the cluster for which it was effective in the mass market is exhausted now, and you need to adapt to the next cluster. And now you have many variants of the GTM motion. And maybe you find a cluster that was similar to someone in your past, but you just can’t recognize it so because there are so many variants in the graveyard. It’s really a mess.

I really don’t want to be a businessman who tries to be a politician.

No one casually gets up and says, “Hey, I want to run for Senate” or “Hey, I want to become the president.” I don’t understand why we so frankly say, “Hey, I want to be a mass consumer brand.”

Maybe because a lot of us don’t know huge groups are likely heterogeneous even if they look deceivingly homogeneous and heterogeneous scaling is really, really, really, really damn hard.

Another misconception can be that small scale is not worth it. See, if you’re someone in India like me, even a small TAM for low ticket product can produce a business that generates life-changing effects. Low TAM does not have to be high ticket or low ticket or small market size or big market size. There’s a whole world out there, but if you’re in a position like me, there is nothing to lose and a lot more to gain to go even for low ticket, low-TAM things.

There are 4 things under the hood :

• TAM by participant count (small/homogeneous vs. large/heterogeneous)
• Ticket size (high vs. low)
• Absolute market value (total possible revenue)
• Personal life-changing quotient (what that revenue means to you)