How the field got here, what changed, and what works now
Neither category creation nor the discipline of taking a product to market is new, but the way companies do both has changed a great deal. Here is how the field got here.
Sequoia published a short online book, The Templeton Compression and the Sales Ready Product, about how young enterprise companies learn to sell. Mark Leslie, the founder of Veritas Software, opened with the sales learning curve, an idea he first described with Charles Holloway in Harvard Business Review in 2006: every company goes through a period of learning how to sell before its reps bring in more than they cost, and scaling the sales team before that learning is done is expensive. In that first phase he recommended hiring a few "Renaissance" reps, generalists who work as easily with product and engineering as with customers.
Jim Goetz followed with a tribute to Don Templeton, a sales engineer whose methods shaped Palo Alto Networks and Nimble Storage. Templeton worked as a forward scout, inventoried every objection prospects raised, qualified the first customers narrowly, and built a demo on the prospect's own data that could win the deal in the room. Goetz called the result a Sales Ready Product, and its effect on the sales cycle the Templeton Compression.
What it got right: Someone has to stand between the market and the product, turning what buyers say into what gets built and how it gets sold. A product built that way sells faster, and revenue that arrives earlier funds everything else.
What works less well now: Being sales ready was once a gate a company passed before launch. Today a competitor can build an impressive demo in weeks, products change every few weeks, and buyers often compare options before the first sales call. The principles still hold, but the work never finishes, and it has to reach buyers well before the demo.
Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney published Play Bigger, which made category design a strategic discipline. Their thesis was that companies that create and lead categories capture most of the value in them; by the authors' analysis, category kings took about 76 percent of their category's market capitalization. The book became required reading for founders raising money in Silicon Valley, and for good reason.
What it got right: Categories matter more than products. The company that defines the category often wins, even without the "best" product.
What works less well now: The lightning-strike launch model, which depended on large budgets, PR orchestration, and analyst relations, along with the idea that a company designs a category internally and then reveals it through a coordinated campaign.
April Dunford published Obviously Awesome, a rigorous framework for positioning. Her focus is how to position a product effectively within the market's existing understanding.
What it got right: Positioning is a strategic discipline. You need clarity on your differentiated value, your best-fit customers, and the market context that makes you the obvious choice.
What it does not set out to solve: Positioning usually works within a category that already exists. In an established category, it helps you win share, but you are still paying the competition tax in someone else's category.
Social platforms increasingly stopped showing people content from the accounts they follow and started showing content based on what they are interested in. The algorithm, more than your network, became the distributor.
What changed for founders: Posting to your followers is no longer enough. Your content has to be recognized as valuable to people interested in your problem, whether they follow you or not. Reach became more a matter of merit than of follower count.
Why the founder's voice matters: In an interest-driven feed, a real perspective stands out from generic content. Audiences engage with genuine insight more than corporate messaging, and a founder who shares a consistent category point of view builds an audience the algorithm will extend to new readers.
AI became the platform. Technical capabilities became easier to reproduce, and work that once took months can now take days. Network effects and data moats still matter, but for many companies they have become the baseline for staying in the game.
What changed: Distribution shifted from gatekeepers such as media, analysts, and investors toward direct relationships between founders and their audiences. Attention became harder to orchestrate and more a matter of earning it through consistent narrative work.
The result: Categories now tend to emerge from steady narrative work that changes how a market thinks, more than from orchestrated launches.
An approach to category creation for a market where AI has made capability easy to copy, founders can ship faster than ever, and distribution runs directly between founders and their audiences.
The approach: Build your category narrative in public, consistently. The category comes less from a deck than from the accumulated weight of a point of view that changes how the market thinks.
Play Bigger was right that categories matter. What has changed is how companies create them.
The core insight, that categories matter more than products, still holds. The way companies create them has changed.
You need all three, but each solves a different problem.
| Dimension | Play Bigger (2016) | Obviously Awesome (2019) | Amplified Narrative (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core Problem | How do we create and lead a new category? | How do we position effectively in an existing category? | How do we create a category through narrative when capability is easy to copy? |
| Primary Focus | Category design and orchestrated launches | Product positioning and differentiation | Consistent narrative building and amplification |
| Distribution Model | PR, analysts, media gatekeepers | Assumes marketing and sales will carry the positioning | Founder voice and interest-driven feeds that reach relevant audiences, not just followers |
| Timeline | Long design process, then a big reveal | Positioning sprint of a few weeks, then execution | Continuous narrative work |
| Investment Required | Significant marketing budgets and outside consultants | Workshop or consulting fees, plus existing marketing budget | Founder time and a commitment to consistent amplification |
| Who It's For | Well-funded, later-stage startups | Any company that needs positioning clarity | Any founder with a category insight to share |
| Assumes | Stability, time to orchestrate, gatekeeper access | An existing category framework and a need to differentiate | Easily copied capability, direct distribution, rapid iteration |
| Success Metric | Category ownership and market value | Clear differentiation and sales effectiveness | How quickly the narrative changes how the market thinks |
| When to Use | After product-market fit, with significant funding and an enterprise focus | When messaging is unclear or sales is struggling | When you are competing on features in a market where capability is becoming common |
| Retention Strategy | Assumes customers will wait for the full category vision | Helps close deals but does not address retention directly | Requires retention readiness: what keeps customers while you build the category |
Positioning and category creation are complementary rather than competing approaches.
Define the change in thinking. Identify what makes your approach different in kind rather than incrementally better, and articulate the shift customers have to make to choose you.
This is your strategic foundation. Without it, you are positioning within someone else's category.
Use a positioning framework such as Dunford's to articulate your differentiated value, identify your best-fit customers, and write messaging that makes your category point of view obvious.
This is your execution. You know which category you are creating; now you position yourself clearly within it.
Build your narrative in public through founder-led content, use the market's reaction to refine it, and let the category emerge from the accumulated weight of that work.
This is how the category takes hold. It depends on consistent narrative work more than a single launch or a long consulting engagement.
Your public narrative works like research. Test ideas, refine positioning, learn what resonates, and invite your market to help shape it.
A real point of view stands out among generated content. The narrative is most credible when it comes from the person who understands the problem best.
Watch how your narrative spreads and whether it changes the conversations you have with buyers, then refine it based on what resonates.
Establish the category while your current advantage still sets you apart, rather than after the platform has made it common.
Building a category takes sustained work. Customers have to stay and expand before the full vision exists, so the value you deliver today has to be the first step in the change you describe.
If the competing frameworks feel overwhelming, the short version is that each contributes something you need.
From Play Bigger: Categories matter more than products, and the companies that lead categories capture a disproportionate share of their value. Competing in someone else's category is an uphill fight.
From Obviously Awesome: Positioning is a discipline. You need clarity on your differentiated value, your best-fit customers, and the market context that makes you the obvious choice.
From Amplified Narrative: Categories now come less from orchestrated launches than from steady narrative work. Your voice is the distribution channel, and consistency is the mechanism.
You do not need a large budget, an expensive consultant, or an eighteen-month process to begin.
You need a compelling category point of view, the positioning clarity to make it obvious, and the commitment to share it consistently.
Questions founders often raise when deciding whether category creation is right for them.
That was closer to true when Play Bigger was published in 2016. Category design then usually ran through PR agencies, analyst relations, and large launch budgets.
Today a founder can reach the market directly, through their own writing and conversations, so the work depends more on a compelling point of view and the discipline to share it consistently than on the size of the budget. The distribution channel is your voice more than your wallet.
Positioning usually assumes the category already exists. You are working out how to stand out within a framework the market already understands.
Category creation changes the framework itself. Rather than positioning within "project management software," you might be defining "asynchronous collaboration" or "context-aware work coordination."
Positioning answers: "Why us instead of them?"
Category creation answers: "Why this way instead of the old way?"
You need both. If you only do positioning, though, you are competing in someone else's category and paying the competition tax.
That is often when category work matters most. If your product is not fundamentally different, competing on features tends to become a race to the bottom.
Category creation is less about product differentiation than about reframing the problem. Salesforce's early CRM features were not radically different. Its story changed the question from "which CRM software should we install?" to "why are we installing software at all?"
The Category POV Canvas helps you find the change in thinking that makes your approach the natural choice, even when your features look similar to a competitor's.
There is rarely a single launch day. Categories tend to emerge from steady narrative work, and you can see early signals well before anyone would call the category established.
The timing varies widely by market, but the signals usually arrive in roughly this order:
Ownership of a category takes many months of consistent work. The more useful question is whether you are making progress every week.
Start with the cost of not doing it. Look at your own numbers: how long your sales cycle runs, how often deals come down to a feature or price comparison, how much discount you give to win, and how many alternatives buyers weigh you against. That is your competition tax.
Companies that define their category tend to see the reverse: shorter cycles, firmer pricing, and higher win rates, because they help set the buying criteria.
Measure the effect in your own pipeline rather than relying on industry averages, including any I might offer.
Start with the free tools.
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