Hi, this is Bill Aulet.
And today we're going to talking about total addressable market.
Amanda came to MIT because she wanted
to start a technology company.
I often call her the world most interesting woman,
because she is.
She's never graduated from high school.
She speaks fluent Russian.
She's a concert pianist, a programmer,
and a graphic designer.
So during her first year, she spent a lot
of time exploring different ideas.
But more importantly than the ideas,
Amanda found a group of fellow students
than she loved working with, and who
complemented each other very well.
When you see Amanda working with Andrew, Rohit, Daipan,
you can just feel the energy.
This is really, really important.
When you're going to find someone to work with,
they should be what we call energy amplifiers.
They should give you more energy and you
have great trust and confidence in them.
What we've done is we've created an auto-scheduling platform.
And by auto-scheduling I mean that the general process
of how people set up meetings or social engagements
is currently done through email back and forths that
can be a long and exhaustive and just unnecessary.
So what we've done is we've created a product
and mobile application that can essentially streamline
this process down to a couple of clicks of a button.
So all it is the process you enter
the person you want to meet with,
and a date range and a place, and the platform
that we've built, Thyme, will find the best time for everyone
to meet.
Our team is composed of members from all over the MIT
community, ranging from course two, mechanical engineering,
to course six, computer science, electrical engineering,
to management, course 15.
And somehow everyone could relate
to this particular problem, because it is experienced
everywhere in every corner in every industry.
And I think that all the members of our team
were able to get very excited and very passionate
about solving it because the pain is real to everybody,
no matter what walk of life you are from.
I think the most acute scheduling
problem I've encountered was first semester at MBA.
We have these core teams, which are a group of seven MBA
students that you're put together
with for the entire semester.
So literally we take five, six classes together.
We'd try to find time during the week to meet,
and it'd always end up being that six of us
would finalize a time, and then the seventh person would say,
"Actually guys, I can't make it during that time.
Can we try something else?"
And then we have to go through the entire process
of rescheduling all over again.
And it was always these long email chains.
There was always this back and forth conversation,
because none of us were in the same room.
So it became this really big problem
where I found myself spending a lot of time, like 30 minutes,
just trying to schedule one meeting.
At first, we started talking to our friends
to really understand how are they scheduling.
Because we know our own scheduling habits well enough,
but we wanted to see if that actually translates to what
other people are doing.
And first we talked to our friends.
We asked, "Hey, do you know anyone
else who just hates scheduling, or hates
dealing with that processing, or just paying
somebody else to do their scheduling?"
And we talked to them to find out what they're doing.
From a user behavior standpoint, this problem
is difficult for two main reasons.
One, people's calendars need to be online.
And two, they need to keep them up to date.
From a technology standpoint, I think
scheduling problem is a fairly complicated problem.
It has a lot of aspects to it.
More than that, just at an abstract level,
the fact that it has to be fast enough, so that people don't
have to wait while they're changing parameters
is a really difficult problem.
And the other aspect of this problem
is that it has to be as user friendly as possible.
So the user interface and user experience
has to be so enriching that people just
love it, which, is again, a user experience research
problem that has been one of the things that we are trying to tackle.
I think with the proliferation of mobile devices,
and also with the integration of them into our everyday lives,
we've become so dependent on these devices.
And yet, we notice that the majority of people
still do their scheduling on their computer,
or their laptop, or desktop computer.
And the reason for that is because it's
a very uncomfortable process to do
the scheduling on their mobile phones.
So actually, while this presents a unique challenge
because there's many different platforms
in many different operating systems
now available for mobile phones, we
looked at it as a tremendous opportunity.
Because we would be able to, perhaps, be the first and maybe
have a first mover advantage by going mobile first.
So now put yourself in Amanda's shoes.
How would you find out how big the market is for your idea?
Here today, we'll address this very question.
Specifically you'll learn, first of all,
the concept of total addressable market, or what we call TAM,
and why it's so important.
Secondly, you'll learn how to estimate TAM and more
importantly, how not to estimate TAM.
Thirdly, in what range should your TAM be
for the beachhead market?
What's too big?
What's too small?