SAM

SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) is the subset of TAM that your product can actually address given your current capabilities, geography, distribution channels, and product features. It's the market you could capture if your go-to-market was maximally efficient.

SAM = TAM × (% your product serves) × (% of market you can reach with current distribution). For a restaurant POS startup with a mobile-first product targeting top-50 Indian cities, SAM is not all 75 lakh Indian restaurants — it's the 8 lakh restaurants in those cities that have smartphones and internet access and can afford the software.

SAM is the number investors actually want to see in your pitch — it's more credible than TAM because it shows market discipline and understanding of real addressable opportunity.

Indian startups frequently present global TAM as their SAM, which investors immediately flag. The SAM for an Indian HR tech startup is not the "global HR software market worth ₹25 lakh crore" — it's the Indian organized private sector that uses digital HR tools, roughly 2–3 lakh companies, at appropriate Indian price points.

A credible Indian SAM calculation includes Indian pricing adjustments (10–20x lower than US), geographic constraints (Tier-1 cities for B2B SaaS initially), and segment constraints (organized sector only, companies above 50 employees, etc.).