Category creation requires ecosystem validation

You're not building a category until there is competition. It's not officially actually a category until there's more companies that do that. And that was a big learning for me in this whole process of category creation, is that it's actually okay when new companies come in that say they're that category because it's just validating the fact that there is a new category.

When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership like why is this the category? What are the unique value propositions of this particular thing? What are the pain points it solves? And then of course, getting a lot of content around because when you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that.

Once you're the dominant player in that market, a cool move to do is to actually extend the boundaries of the category so that you can continue to grow. And most of the category creation examples we see are companies that when they were 200, 300, 400 million revenue dominating their space, then decided to move the goalposts.

Category creation is interesting. Like most companies, if you look at their arc, even the category creators that are successful, they did not start out as category creators. So they started out as a niche play in an existing category.

One thing that's really important in category creation as well is actually PR. You need to get this category and positioning out there at a high level in order to test it out and see if it makes sense and if it's resonating.

You need to build relationships with them. You need to work with them to create your category as well. So with the visual collaboration, for example, we weren't ranking, we weren't categorized in visual collaboration on G2 Crowd, and we had to meet with them and explain what it was and talk to them about the differentiation of this category versus other categories in terms of features and all of that stuff so that they could understand how they would differentiate this category from another category.

A lot of companies want to position themselves as category creators, and I actually hate that. It doesn't work. It doesn't land with press, and most of the time it's not totally true.