Bootstrapping a Unicorn: Day 3

Market as Map

Day 3 asks me to map my market. TAM, SAM, SOM. Total Addressable Market, Serviceable Available Market, Serviceable Obtainable Market. The acronyms make my brain hurt. I have been coaching tennis for 35 years. I can watch a player warm up and tell you three things about their mental game before they hit a ball. But ask me to calculate market size and I feel like I am learning a foreign language.

Then I translate the question into something I actually understand. Who feels this problem? Who feels it right now? Who can I reach? Suddenly it clicks. I know exactly who feels the problem. Parents watching their kids train. They are spending fifty thousand dollars or more per year on coaching and travel. They can see something is not working but they cannot name what it is. They watch their kid fall apart under pressure. They see coaches review video on iPads at picnic tables. The data is right there. The conversation looks productive.

But the environment is doing nothing.

I was watching the W50K tournament at Austin Tennis Academy yesterday. Between matches, I saw a coach and player sitting at a picnic table. iPad between them. The coach pointed at the screen. The player nodded. Everything about it looked efficient except for one thing. Meaning was not moving. The player nodded at the right times. The coach gestured at the footage. Neither of them noticed they were having the conversation in a dead space.

Inside a Founders' Room, that same review becomes something else entirely. The footage displays on a responsive wall. The conversation gets recorded. Not just words. Tone. Rhythm. How long the coach talked versus how long the player talked. Where the player looked confused but stayed quiet. Where the coach thought they were being clear but the player heard something different.

I described this setup to a coach last week. He shrugged. "Seems like overkill. The iPad works fine." Maybe. But "works fine" is exactly the problem. Fine gets you compliance. Fine does not get you transformation. The question is not whether the current method functions. The question is whether it produces the change you are claiming to sell.

That is what the startup people call feedback loops. I have been building them in coaching for decades without knowing the term. Now I am learning the vocabulary so I can explain what I already know how to do.

This is the work of Day 3. Stop staring at the thing you are building and start studying where it needs to live. Not the product. The environment around it.

Learning to Read Energy

Marc Andreessen writes that product/market fit is being in a good market with a product satisfying it. I read that sentence five times before I understood what he was actually saying. He is not talking about market size. He is talking about energy. Whether people care.

This maps directly onto something I already know from coaching. You can always tell when a training drill is not working. The energy goes flat. Players go through the motions. Feedback gets vague. The silence tells you everything. The real problem is not that players hate the drill. The real problem is they do not care about it either way. Indifference.

Andreessen wrote about startups where the press reviews were "kind of blah." That phrase stopped me. Not bad reviews. Blah reviews. No one cared enough to get angry or excited. The product landed in a space where nothing was really at stake for anyone. I have seen this exact pattern with training programs. Parents sign up. They show up. They do not complain. They also do not reengage after the trial period. No signal. No motion.

Bad press at least means someone felt something. The old saying about bad press being better than no press makes sense now, but only after you already exist. Before you exist, the risk is not negative reaction. The risk is no reaction at all.

So the question is not how big is my market. The question is where is the energy already concentrated. Where do people care enough that when I show up with Court 4, they will actually respond.

Facebook started with Harvard students. Not because Mark Zuckerberg wanted a small business. Harvard was a closed loop where he could test fast and see reactions immediately. Tesla started with the Roadster. Luxury performance cars. People who already cared deeply about acceleration and design and could afford to pay for both. The niche was not the ceiling. It was the door.

Court 4 will start with junior tennis families. Parents already spending fifty thousand dollars or more per year on training and travel. They already care. They are already looking for something better. When they see Court 4 work for their kid's focus and composure, they will not just be customers. They will be translators. They will start asking if the same system could work in their office. In their kid's school. In their leadership training. The parent becomes the bridge from tennis to everywhere else.

Three Roles I Missed

I am reading Ash Maurya's Running Lean and he keeps distinguishing between users and customers. It sounds obvious. The user experiences the product. The customer pays for it. But I kept getting stuck on Court 4 because in my case they are different people. The player is the user. The parent is the customer.

Then I realized there is a third role I had not named. The adapter. The person who sees what the system could become beyond its current use. The person who does not just consume value but multiplies it through imagination.

In Court 4, parents play all three roles at once. They pay for access. They observe the user experience through their child. Then they start imagining other applications. This is something I have watched happen for years without having language for it. A parent sees their kid get calmer and more focused on court. Two weeks later they ask if the same approach could work with their sales team. Or in their kid's classroom. Or with their own leadership challenges.

I thought that was just parents being interested. Now I see it is the actual scaling mechanism. The Founders' Room will not scale through advertising. It will scale through adaptation. Every parent who experiences clarity through Court 4 will imagine a new use case somewhere else. They become the bridge from tennis to everywhere else.

A Pattern I Keep Seeing

Steve Blank has a phrase that keeps showing up in startup materials. "No facts exist inside your building, only opinions." The first time I read it, I thought it was just advice about customer research. Get out of your office. Go talk to people. Standard stuff.

But it connects to something deeper I have been studying. Bronson Alcott's Temple School method. Alcott walked into his classroom in 1834 expecting to learn from his students. Not as a teaching technique. As a moral stance. He believed truth emerged through conversation, not from doctrine handed down. Discovery through encounter, not theory.

Blank is telling founders the same thing Alcott was telling teachers. You cannot rely on what you think you know sitting alone. The facts live in the dialogue. This is not about being humble for strategy reasons. It is about recognizing that your theories only become real when they collide with other people's experience.

For me, this connection is not metaphorical. Court 4 and the Founders' Room are literally the same building viewed from different elevations. Downstairs on Court 4, attention gets trained through movement. Perception and action fuse into flow. Upstairs in the Founders' Room, attention gets trained through dialogue. Language and reflection fuse into understanding.

The parent stands between these two floors. They experience both. What their child experiences physically on Court 4 becomes language in the Founders' Room. What gets reflected on upstairs becomes behavior downstairs. The parent translates between motion and meaning.

I have been building this architecture for years. Now I am learning the startup vocabulary to explain what I already know how to construct.

Parents Are Already Participants

Parents shape the emotional field whether they realize it or not. When they are anxious, the player feels it. When they are distracted, the player reads that as disappointment. I have watched kids misread a parent leaving for the restroom during a match as anger. The child's nervous system scans constantly for safety cues. It does not read the parent's words. It reads posture, tone, where attention points.

This is why capturing the parent experience during Court 4 sessions matters so much. Right now, parents sit and watch. We have no data on what they are actually doing. Are they leaning forward when the player struggles? Are they checking their phone during rallies? Do they whisper to other parents at key moments? Each of these actions sends signals the player picks up even when the parent thinks they are invisible.

With consent and clear framing, we can document this. Wide-angle cameras in designated observation zones. Full disclosure about what gets recorded and why. The goal is not surveillance. It is feedback. We want to show parents how their attention behaves when love meets pressure.

Later, selected parents could watch that footage in a Founders' Room session. They would see themselves seeing. They would notice when their body language shifted. When they tensed up. When they relaxed. This awareness changes everything. It turns parent education from etiquette lessons into performance architecture.

A New Kind of Literacy

Emotion moves faster than thought in sport. Parents want to help. They do not realize how much they communicate without speaking. A sigh. A posture shift. A glance at the phone. Each one registers as data for the child.

We could build a three-phase program around this. First, parents observe their child's training while we passively record their physiological responses. Simple metrics. Heart rate variability. Posture tracking. Nothing invasive. Second, they enter a Founders' Room to review synchronized clips showing how their attention fluctuated during key moments in the session. Third, a guided discussion explores how those fluctuations might have affected the player's performance.

This is not therapy. It is design. Parents learn to regulate their own attentional fields. The result is calmer athletes, clearer relationships, and insight they can transfer to leadership, teaching, any domain where presence matters under pressure.

The 93 Percent We Ignore

All of this, the parents, the sessions, the markets, rests on one simple fact we rarely acknowledge: most meaning never reaches the words.

People cite the statistic about seven percent of communication coming from words. The exact number might vary depending on the study. The principle holds. Tone, rhythm, body language carry most of the meaning.

Before children understand language, they understand synchrony. Voice. Gaze. Timing. That early template shapes how they interpret every future interaction. When a coach gives feedback, the nervous system listens for safety before it listens for sense. When a boss speaks, the body reads tone before processing content.

This is why Court 4 and the Founders' Room have such potential. They make the invisible visible. A system recording tone, posture, and timing lets people see how presence, not phrasing, carries meaning. We are not replacing human insight. We are making it observable. Turning empathy into measurable data.

Bronson Alcott believed attention itself was moral back in 1834. He said you could not teach truth without embodying it. Modern science gives us tools to test his claim. The body records what the mind denies.

Markets Are Mirrors

If a market is a map, then every early adopter is a mirror. Parents watching Court 4 are not just customers. They are instruments of measurement. Their reactions chart the emotional topography of the product. Their questions trace the edges of the next market. When you watch them, you watch your own assumptions get tested.

The energy that matters most in a market is not financial. It is attentional. Who leans in when they see what you are building? Who tells others about it without being asked? Who argues with you because they care enough to push back? Those people are your landmarks. They show you where to navigate next.

Defining a market is not about demographics. It is about awareness. The total addressable market includes everyone who shares the same problem. The serviceable market includes those who feel it right now. The obtainable market includes those close enough for you to hear their stories. Every conversation adds detail to the map.

What Day 3 Taught Me

When you see a market as terrain of attention rather than a pool of customers, the whole discovery process changes. Listening stops being a tactic and becomes responsibility. You are not just collecting feedback. You are mapping human frustration, aspiration, and misunderstanding. You are identifying where trust breaks down and where curiosity still lives.

This is why the founder's task keeps reminding me of the teacher's task. Both design environments where attention can reorganize. The teacher builds classrooms. The founder builds contexts. Both succeed when their students or customers can perceive the world more clearly than before.

This connects directly to The Alcott Dilemma. The most effective learning requires individual observation, conversational guidance, and adaptive response. That cannot scale using human labor alone. Court 4 and the Founders' Room are my attempts to solve this. I am trying to build architecture where technology amplifies human attention instead of replacing it. Where the environment itself becomes intelligent enough to support the kind of learning once requiring constant human presence.

I came into Day 3 thinking I needed to learn market segmentation. I am leaving it understanding that market is just another word for attention field. The product is not the center. The market is not a spreadsheet. The founder is not the hero. All three are participants in one experiment. The study of how attention flows through human systems.

Court 4 trains attention through motion. The Founders' Room trains attention through reflection. Parents stand between these levels, translating insight from body to word and back again.

The market is not where you sell. It is where you learn to see.

And I am still learning.

Duey Evans
Performance Architect | Founder, Communiplasticity Solutions
📧 [email protected] 
📞 469.955.DUEY (3839)
🌐 theperformancearchitect.com 
🔗 Connect on LinkedIn