A company entering a new market faces a choice it usually does not notice making: fight for a seat that is already occupied, or occupy a gap that nobody is defending. The default is the fight — because the occupied seat is visible, prestigious and easy to describe («we will be like them, but better»). «Better» is the most expensive word in an entry strategy: the incumbent owns the default, and every point of «better» is bought at the entrant's expense, in a currency the incumbent can always print more of: familiarity.
An undefended position has a shape you can describe in one sentence: a segment the incumbents serve with visible indifference — their complaint patterns say so before any analyst does. A price point nobody defends, because the incumbents' cost structure cannot reach it without hurting their core business. A service level the market has stopped expecting — and stopped being surprised it isn't getting. A buying occasion that falls between everyone's product categories. In each case the gap is protected not by your cleverness but by their economics: following you into it would cost the incumbent more than it costs you.
Gaps are not oversights. They persist because the incumbent's machine is tuned for the position it already owns: its pricing, its cost base, its sales incentives, its brand promises. Moving into the gap means un-tuning all of it. That is why structural gaps last, and why «they could easily copy us» is usually wrong — they could, and they won't, because for them the arithmetic of the gap is bad and for you it is the whole point of entering. The best positions in an entry strategy are the ones the market's owners can see and still cannot take.
The best position in a new market is not the biggest one. It is the one the incumbents cannot afford to defend.
Not every vacancy is a position. The test is threefold: the gap must be big enough to matter — an entry that cannot reach meaningful volume in it has merely found an expensive way to be small; durable — not a temporary artifact of a fashion or a regulation the incumbents are already adapting to; and reachable — the buyers in the gap must be findable through channels you can actually afford. A gap that fails any of the three is a tourist attraction, not a strategy.
Finding the gap is the output of honest fieldwork: the signal stack described here tells you where incumbents are failing, and honest sizing tells you whether the gap is big enough to matter. Together they form the second proof in the set an entry strategy must close before launch — and they are the core of the market-entry practice.
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