SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market): the slice of SAM you can actually win in the next three to five years given your team, capital, and competition.
When Notion 2.0 shipped in 2018, the global productivity SAM was already dominated by Microsoft, Google, and Atlassian. Founder Ivan Zhao has said the early SOM target was the small, vocal slice of power users frustrated with Evernote and Confluence. That base, perhaps a few million users, was small enough to win and noisy enough to fund word-of-mouth growth into the broader market.
