Sustainable Packaging Mandate: Reframing a Founder's Market Opportunity

Aayush was working with a US-based sustainable packaging company as part of Encito's early-stage founder engagement work. The company had built a product that could replace plastic wrappers across a wide range of packaging applications, but their pitch deck framed their market narrowly around cardboard packaging.

When Aayush reviewed their materials and ran his own bottom-up market sizing, he saw the mismatch immediately. The company's product was applicable well beyond cardboard, covering packaging across food-adjacent, industrial, and consumer goods categories. Their self-defined market was a fraction of what they could credibly claim.

He rebuilt the market sizing using a bottom-up approach, starting from the company's actual product capability and working outward to identify the full range of addressable packaging categories. Rather than accepting the founder's framing, he anchored the analysis in what the product could actually do, then mapped the customer segments and go-to-market pathways that followed from that broader definition.

The revised market sizing materially expanded the company's addressable opportunity. He walked the founders through the analysis, explaining the assumptions behind each category and how the go-to-market strategy would need to evolve to capture the broader market. The founders were receptive, and the revised framing gave them a stronger foundation for investor conversations.