Most companies think about growth the wrong way.
They look at their existing market, count potential customers, and start optimizing – better features, sharper messaging, tighter sales processes. But in conversations Greg and I keep coming back to, we’ve found that this approach misses something fundamental. The biggest growth opportunity for most businesses isn’t hiding in the competition. It’s sitting in plain sight, in all the people who want what you offer but, for one reason or another, can’t get there.
That’s non-consumption. And understanding it might be the most important thing you can do for your business.
What non-consumption is
Non-consumption isn’t simply “people who aren’t buying my product.”
That’s too broad and ultimately not useful. The concept is where people want to make progress, but they can’t. It’s pent-up demand. A struggling moment that hasn’t been resolved. People caught in a world of workarounds, waiting to move forward but stuck.
There’s a crucial distinction here. Someone who’s happy with a competitor, or who genuinely doesn’t need what you sell, is not a non-consumer. Non-consumers are the people with a real, felt struggle – people who have the desire to make progress but are blocked by a barrier.
That barrier might be price, it might be access. Or, it might be a lack of knowledge, time, or confidence. But the desire is there, the energy is there, and the gate just hasn’t been opened.
Greg frames it well from a sales perspective: it’s the people who want to do something that your product will fulfill, but for some reason they can’t – economically, time, knowledge – any of those things will get in the way.
This matters because it reframes how you think about market size.
You might have 100,000 potential customers in your total addressable market. But how many of them are actively struggling? How many are sitting in workarounds, waiting for something better? That’s the real number – and it’s often far smaller, and far more actionable, than the total market figure suggests.
Why it’s where growth comes from
Non-consumption is where growth comes from. If you’re thinking about growth from the supply side, you’re mostly stealing share from somebody else. But when you look at where markets have truly exploded, non-consumption is almost always the engine.
The camera industry is a good example. For decades, camera manufacturers competed on image quality – better lenses, faster shutters, more megapixels. They kept going up-market.
What they didn’t ask was: how many people want to take a photo but don’t have a camera with them?
The answer was: almost everyone, almost all the time.
I have a vivid memory of watching my kids play soccer, knowing I had a good camera at home, knowing how to use it – but not having it with me. That picture of my kids, taken on a phone, was better than nothing. That’s the definition of non-consumption: I wanted to take a good picture, but I just didn’t have the ability right now.
The first camera phones were objectively terrible. Grainy, slow, nothing close to a professional shot. But for that struggling moment, they were enough. And within a decade, the camera market had contracted by over 90%.
The product didn’t have to be twice as good as anything else on the market. It just had to be better than nothing, in the moment it was needed.
The sales and strategy lens
From a sales perspective, non-consumption asks a different set of questions. Instead of “who can buy this?” the question becomes “who is struggling right now, and what’s in the way?”
As Greg puts it: you’re looking at your products, the things you’re responsible for – how many more people want to do this, but can’t, and what are the barriers? You then pick off barriers.
Your strategy tells you which barriers you can pick off and which you can’t. Some businesses can go down-market to reach non-consumers. Others can’t – their margins, their model, or their brand won’t support it.
This is also why large, established companies often get disrupted. Their financial strategy rewards going up-market – better margins, bigger contracts, more sophisticated customers. Non-consumers, by definition, tend to live at the low end. So incumbents leave them behind, and a startup walks in with something half as good, at half the price, and starts building.
IBM saw this coming with the PC and had the self-awareness to spin off an entirely separate division – moving it to a different part of the country specifically to avoid the gravitational pull of their existing business model. Most companies don’t move that fast.
The starting point
If you want to find non-consumption in your own market, I’d suggest you start with struggle. Not features, not pricing tiers – but the struggle.
Who wants to do what you do – but can’t? What’s stopping them? And is that a barrier you’re positioned to remove?
The answers won’t come from a spreadsheet. They’ll come from talking to the people who are almost your customer – but aren’t.