Your Bright Ideas Have A Wider Reach Than You Think

I’m in Cape Town this month. Just before arriving, I was in Vienna.

One ‘bright idea’ that I saw me in Vienna, the European city entrepreneurs flocked to for opportunity in the 1700’s, was the wooden brick horse-stalls and carriage entryways.

Rather than using normal stone bricks for floor, wooden bricks were used in high-traffic areas where horses went near living areas.

The wood dulls the sound of the hooves so that an arriving carriage doesn’t wake up the entire home at night or disturb its European Aristocrat owner.

Shortly afterwards, I flew from Vienna to Cape Town. There is a large castle in the center, and again I saw the wooden bricks in the entranceway to the castle.

“The wooden bricks dull the sounds of the horses hooves so that the castle isn’t disturbed by arriving carriages,” the tour guide explained.

The Lesson

When the first wooden bricks were used in Vienna, Cape Town likely didn’t exist. Perhaps it was still a tightly-kept Portuguese trade secret, the only known sea route to India.

The entrepreneur who thought of using wooden bricks to dull the sounds of hooves probably thought about his wealthy Viennese customers, and perhaps he thought about how to bring the bricks all over Europe, but he definitely wasn’t thinking that someday they might be used in Cape Town or the other far-flung cities of the world.

Perhaps you have a business, maybe just a business idea. If you’ve tried to figure out your TAM, Total Addressable Market, you may find it challenging or impossible. But one thing is for sure… whatever number you’ve calculated for your TAM is probably a fraction of the market you could serve with just a little product modification, marketing twist, and/or geographic expansion.

If you’re looking at one of your bright ideas and thinking, “This is great, but the market is too small!” just remember the wooden bricks. Invented in Vienna. Used all the way on the southern tip of Africa.