Trying to take 0.01% of a market from existing businesses who'll fight hard to retain their customers is immeasurably harder than trying to grow the market by 0.01% by looking for businesses who aren't yet buying a product in that market. Unless you're launching something in a completely saturated marketed it's always better (cheaper, faster, easier) to find new customers than trying to take existing one from other business.
Bonus: Growing the market by 0.01% gets you more customers than taking 0.01% of the existing market.
The main reason why it isn't immeasurably harder for an indie founder is they can target market segments that are just not interesting to market leaders who already have a tight/clear idea of who their target customer is.
Additionally, as an indie founder you essentially have an invisibility cloak because you won't even be on the radar of the market leaders.
These two reasons are why someone like Less Annoying CRM can build a $1m/year business and Intuit couldn't even give a tiny care about it.
You can even study the market leaders and tackle things they are not interested in fixing - but that some customers have asked for on forums and such.
Of course, the indie founder invisibility cloak effect diminishes the smaller the market is, or the larger market share you take.
It's pretty hard to go un-noticed when you enter a market that just has 1,000 customers.
Likewise, it's pretty hard to go un-noticed when you start getting 1%+ of a larger market. But that's ok, because if you do get that big, you most likely know what you're doing.
> Bonus: Growing the market by 0.01% gets you more customers than taking 0.01% of the existing market.
I see what you were getting at, but you erred in this case: the two are identical.
If the market is a million people, growing the market by 0.01% causes you to have 100 of the 1,000,100 people in the market, while claiming 0.01% of the existing market causes you to have 100 of the 1,000,000 people in the market. So the absolute figure is the same, and the fraction you have is smaller.
Bonus: Growing the market by 0.01% gets you more customers than taking 0.01% of the existing market.