Niche Scoring Without Overengineering (First-Time Founders)

Market-sizing methodology is heavy. TAM, SAM, SOM, bottom-up models, addressable spend curves. None of it earns its place when you are picking your first niche from a shortlist of five candidates. Here is the lightweight version.

Five and Five

Five candidates. Five criteria. Score one to ten, sum, compare. Fifteen minutes total. That is the whole system.

What You Can Skip

TAM/SAM/SOM. Bottom-up market sizing. Competitor matrices. Persona docs. Customer journey diagrams. Strategic positioning canvases. None of those are bad. They are infrastructure for teams pitching a Series A. You are picking which niche to interview first.

What You Cannot Skip

You cannot skip listing more than one candidate. You cannot skip rating boring criteria like reachability and existing spend. You cannot skip honest builder-fit scoring.

Those three habits are the entire engine. Everything else is decoration.

When Heavier Tooling Earns Its Place

Past about ten candidate niches across multiple verticals, you might want a spreadsheet with weighted criteria. Or when raising, investors want a market size estimate. By then you will know what to track because the work itself will demand it.

The Trade

Fifteen minutes. No spreadsheet. No framework name. Catches the worst niche picks before commitment. The alternative is heavier methodology that delays the decision and produces no more useful filter than the lightweight version.