Large companies often focus R&D on high-ticket items, neglecting smaller accessory categories. This creates a market gap for focused startups to innovate and solve specific problems that bigger players overlook, allowing them to build a defensible niche.

Unrivaled positions itself not as a competitor to the WNBA, but as a complementary league that supports the entire ecosystem. By providing WNBA players a domestic offseason opportunity to compete and build their brands, Unrivaled helps raise the profile of the players and women's basketball as a whole.

The success of alternative sports like Wiffle Ball or Pickleball depends less on the game itself and more on creating celebrity figures and compelling human narratives around them. Like Vince McMahon with wrestling, founders must build stories to attract and retain an audience.

When Figma started, VCs deemed the designer market too small. While this made fundraising harder, it also meant fewer competitors rushed in. This perceived niche gave Figma the time and space to build a complex, defensible product before the market's true potential became obvious to everyone.

According to Shopify's President, the key to building the next wave of billion-dollar brands isn't capturing a slice of an existing market, but creating a new one entirely. Brands like Skims and Gymshark succeeded by redefining their categories (shapewear, athletic apparel), effectively creating new TAM rather than just competing for it.

Reebok is reviving its brand by avoiding direct competition with Nike and Adidas. Instead of chasing established male stars, they are using brand legends like Shaq to build credibility with overlooked and emerging demographics, such as high school athletes and female basketball stars. This is a classic flanking strategy to capture ignored market segments.

Figma's market initially seemed too small to attract major VC interest or intense competition, giving them space to build a defensible product. Founders can gain a significant advantage by working in overlooked spaces, provided they have genuine passion to sustain them for a decade or more.

Well-funded startups are pressured by investors to target large markets. This strategic constraint allows bootstrapped founders to outmaneuver them by focusing on and dominating a specific niche that is too small for the venture-backed competitor to justify.

Hobson provides a powerful financial analogy: women's sports are the "small caps" of the sports industry. While large men's leagues are like blue-chip stocks with slower growth, women's leagues have a much smaller valuation base, giving them a significantly higher likelihood of doubling or tripling in value as viewership and media rights catch up to their potential.