The market can start beyond your neighborhood.
The International Telecommunication Union estimates that 6 billion people used the internet in 2025, roughly 74% of the world’s population. Its definition measures use in the previous three months. These are connected people, not six billion daily active users or six billion potential customers for a particular product.
There is time online, but attention is earned.
DataReportal’s Digital 2025 US report gives an average of 6 hours 40 minutes online per day across devices, using GWI’s Q3 2024 survey of internet users aged 16 and over. This is a dated survey snapshot, not an average for every US consumer. The 2026 report changes to weekly media measures and explicitly warns against comparison with earlier reports. We use the older figure with its date rather than claim that daily internet time keeps rising.
Stripe is seeing faster early growth.
Stripe’s 2025 annual letter, published February 24, 2026, says its new-business cohort grew around 50% faster than the 2024 cohort. The count of companies reaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue within three months of launch doubled. Among Atlas startups, 20% charged a first customer within 30 days in 2025, compared with 8% in 2020.
Keep the milestone attached to its meaning.
The letter reports a $10 million ARR milestone, not a typical time to the first $1 million in collected revenue. ARR describes recurring revenue at an annualized rate; it is different from cash already received or profit. A doubled count of fast-growing companies also does not tell us what proportion of all new businesses achieved that result.
These observations cover businesses on Stripe and Atlas. They are encouraging evidence of acceleration in those populations. They do not establish that every new business grows faster, or that AI alone caused the change.
Use the opportunity at human scale.
A specialist product can find people across cities and countries who share the same problem. That makes a narrow idea worth exploring even when the people around you do not need it. Language, payments, local requirements, customer support, and the ability to be found still affect how far it can travel.
Our interpretation is that more founders can test whether distant demand exists before building a large operation. Start with a reachable group and a result worth paying for. Expand when you understand what customers value and what it costs to serve them.
Your first useful milestone is closer.
A million-dollar business is an outcome, not a plan for next Tuesday. The next milestone might be a customer paying for a completed task, returning for a second use, or recommending the product without being asked. Those signals tell you more about your own idea than somebody else’s unusually fast growth curve. Design a business you can keep learning from while the audience is still small.