To justify its massive valuation, OpenEvidence must expand its Total Addressable Market (TAM). This means moving beyond the current online ad spend for doctors and capturing a significant portion of the budget that pharmaceutical companies allocate to their army of sales reps who conduct in-person visits.
Instead of charging doctors for its valuable productivity tools, Doximity offers them for free to maximize user engagement. This creates a highly concentrated, valuable audience of physicians, which is then monetized through targeted advertising from pharmaceutical companies, its primary revenue source.
While a strong business model is necessary, it doesn't generate outsized returns. The key to successful growth investing is identifying a Total Addressable Market (TAM) that consensus views as small but which you believe will be massive. This contrarian take on market size is where the real alpha is found.
The conversation around Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) has evolved beyond simple refinement. With newly accessible data, companies are fundamentally re-evaluating their Total Addressable Market (TAM), challenging long-held assumptions about who their potential customers are and how big the opportunity is.
While digital advertising constitutes 75% of spend in the general economy, it's only about half that in healthcare. This lag, driven by an entrenched reliance on in-person sales reps, creates a long-term secular tailwind for platforms like Doximity as the industry inevitably shifts its marketing budget online.
Successful AI products like Gamma and Cursor don't just add a feature; they create so much value they can charge orders of magnitude more than legacy alternatives. This massive Total Addressable Market (TAM) expansion, not a simple price bump, is the engine of their explosive growth.
Unlike incumbents, new biotech and pharma companies often lack established sales forces. They launch with a 'digital first' go-to-market strategy, turning to platforms like Doximity early in their lifecycle. This creates a new and rapidly growing customer segment for Doximity, independent of the incumbents' slower transition.
AI adoption in healthcare has accelerated by sidestepping slow enterprise sales cycles. Companies like Open Evidence offer free, consumer-like apps directly to doctors (prosumers). This bottom-up approach creates widespread use, forcing organizations to adopt the technology once a critical mass of their staff is already using it.
Companies like Amazon (from books to cloud) and Intuitive Surgical (from one specific surgery to many) became massive winners by creating new markets, not just conquering existing ones. Investors should prioritize businesses with the innovative capacity to expand their TAM, as initial market sizes are often misleadingly small.
The company became a breakout success by targeting a specific high-value niche (doctors needing research), building a tailored LLM product for their workflow, and creating a perfect monetization loop with targeted advertisers (pharmaceutical companies) who need to reach that exact audience.
Even with strong revenue growth, founders should seriously consider M&A offers if their Total Addressable Market (TAM) isn't expanding at a faster rate. A stagnant TAM indicates a future ceiling on value creation, and selling may be the optimal outcome before hitting that wall.