Go Deeper, Not Wider.

Growth has a way of making founders impatient. You find something that works. Customers want it. Revenue starts moving. The economics begin making sense. And almost immediately, the conversation changes. What else can we sell? What other category can we enter? What company could we acquire? How do we increase our TAM?

It feels logical. If one product gives you access to a billion-dollar market, adding another product should give you access to another billion-dollar market. More products. More customers. More revenue. A bigger company.

But I think founders often start looking outward too early. There is usually far more territory surrounding a successful product than it initially appears. The question isn't always what else you can build. Sometimes the better question is:

How much deeper can you go with what already works?

Founders talk about total addressable market as if it were a map. Your company occupies a territory. Eventually, you want more territory. So you move into the neighboring market. Then another. A software company adds payments. A healthcare company adds another condition. A consumer brand adds another product category. A services company acquires an adjacent business.

Each expansion increases the theoretical size of the market. On a slide, this looks great. The TAM gets larger. But TAM on a slide and accessible market in reality are very different things.

Every new category introduces new complexity. New customers. New competitors. New messaging. New operations. New expertise. New acquisition channels. Sometimes new regulation. Sometimes an entirely different reason for the customer to trust you. The market may have expanded. But your ability to serve it efficiently may have decreased.

There is another way to increase the amount of market available to you. Instead of expanding the perimeter, increase your penetration inside it.

Go deeper.

When people talk about whitespace, they usually mean product whitespace. What hasn't been built yet? What feature is missing? What adjacent product could exist?

But whitespace exists around distribution too. A great product can exist in a market where enormous groups of potential customers still don't know about it, can't access it, don't understand it, don't trust it, or aren't being spoken to correctly. Those are markets too.

Imagine a product used by 5% of the people who could realistically benefit from it. The obvious founder instinct might be to build Product #2. But there may be a much larger opportunity in understanding why the other 95% haven't bought Product #1. Maybe the product needs a different channel. Maybe it needs a different price. Maybe it needs to be packaged differently. Maybe one customer needs education while another needs convenience. Maybe the product is correct and the distribution is wrong.

This is where I think some of the most interesting companies are built. They don't necessarily invent an entirely new thing. They discover a new way for an existing thing to reach people.

Bloom is a useful example. Greens powders existed long before Bloom Nutrition. Supplements existed. Influencer marketing existed. Nothing about putting nutrients into a flavored powder was technologically revolutionary.

But Bloom understood something that many incumbents didn't. There was whitespace in who the category was speaking to and how it was being distributed.

The traditional supplement industry often looked like the supplement industry. Performance. Bodybuilding. Clinical packaging. Aggressive claims. Shelves filled with products that largely spoke the same language.

Bloom approached the market differently. The product was designed to live naturally inside social media. The branding was recognizable. The founder became part of the distribution. Content and product reinforced each other. Then that digital attention translated into massive retail distribution.

The innovation wasn't simply inside the tub. A huge part of the innovation was the path between the tub and the customer. That's an important distinction. Because if you only looked for product whitespace, you might have concluded that greens powders were already crowded. If you looked for distribution whitespace, there was still enormous territory available.

This has changed how I think about TAM. Your addressable market isn't determined exclusively by what you sell. It is also determined by who you can efficiently reach.

A new distribution channel can function almost like a new product. If you sell exclusively online and successfully enter retail, you haven't changed the product, but you have changed the market available to it. If you sell directly to consumers and create a successful B2B channel, the same thing happens. If your product historically serves one demographic and you discover positioning that resonates with another, your effective market expands again. Same core product. Different access.

And unlike launching something completely unrelated, each expansion can strengthen the same underlying machine. Your brand gets stronger. Your purchasing power improves. Your customer data gets better. Your operations become more efficient. Your acquisition knowledge compounds. Your existing infrastructure handles more volume.

This is the kind of growth I find particularly attractive.

Growth where the company gets bigger without becoming proportionally more complicated.

This applies to acquisitions too. Once companies have capital, buying growth becomes tempting. You can acquire another product. Another brand. Another customer base. Another revenue stream. And sometimes that is exactly the right decision.

But revenue outside your core market isn't automatically valuable just because it is revenue. An acquisition can increase the size of the company while decreasing its coherence. Now you're operating two different machines. Different customers. Different distribution. Different economics. Different expertise. Management attention gets divided. The spreadsheet says you've grown. Operationally, you've become wider.

There are situations where the better acquisition is not the company that gives you access to an entirely new TAM. It is the company that lets you capture more of the TAM you already understand. Acquire distribution. Acquire audience. Acquire infrastructure. Acquire capabilities. Acquire something that makes the existing machine stronger.

There is enormous leverage in knowing exactly who you serve and then owning more of the path required to serve them.

Depth Compounds

The appeal of going deeper is that knowledge compounds. Every customer teaches you more about the next customer. Every advertisement teaches you more about the next advertisement. Every operational problem teaches you something applicable to the rest of the business. Every improvement affects a larger base.

You become unusually good at solving one class of problem. That expertise creates efficiency. Efficiency creates margin. Margin creates resources. Resources allow you to penetrate the market further. The cycle reinforces itself.

When you expand too early into unrelated markets, some of that compounding resets. You are learning again. That isn't necessarily bad. But it should be acknowledged. Diversification feels safer because you have more things. Sometimes concentration is safer because you actually understand what you're doing.

Amazon went wide. Eventually

There is an obvious counterargument to all of this. Some of the greatest companies in history became great precisely because they expanded. Amazon didn't remain a bookstore. Apple doesn't only make computers. Google didn't stop at search.

The lesson isn't that companies shouldn't expand. It's that sequence matters.

Amazon earned the right to expand. It built extraordinary infrastructure, customer relationships, logistics, technology, and distribution. Then it leveraged those advantages into adjacent categories. The expansion worked because the core capabilities traveled with it. That's very different from adding products because growth in the original market has become harder. One is leverage. The other can be escape.

Before entering a new market, I think founders should ask themselves an uncomfortable question:

Are we expanding because this opportunity genuinely compounds what we're good at, or because going deeper has become difficult?

Those motivations can produce very different companies.

Closing

Founders naturally want more. More customers. More products. More markets. More revenue. There is nothing wrong with that ambition. But bigger does not always require wider.

Sometimes the next billion dollars of opportunity isn't sitting in the category next door. It's hiding inside the market you're already in. In customers who haven't heard of you. In channels you haven't figured out. In demographics nobody has spoken to correctly. In partnerships nobody has built. In distribution that still creates friction. In a product people already want but can't access in the way they want to buy it.

Those are forms of whitespace too. And they can be more valuable than another product because every dollar spent capturing them strengthens something you've already built.

Eventually, great companies expand. They enter new categories. They launch new products. They acquire businesses. They become things their founders couldn't have imagined at the beginning. But expansion is most powerful when it comes from strength rather than impatience.

Before you build the next product, acquire the next company, or draw another circle around your TAM, look at the circle you're already standing inside. You may own much less of it than you think.

Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn't to go wider. It's to go deeper.

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See you next week, Maximilian