If you’ve read any marketing book in the last decade, you’ve encountered the category-creation framework. Pick a problem the market doesn’t yet have a name for. Name it. Plant the flag. Become the canonical solution. The success stories — Drift’s “conversational marketing,” Gong’s “revenue intelligence,” HubSpot’s “inbound marketing,” Salesforce’s “social enterprise” — have been turned into a repeatable playbook in industry conferences and consultant pitches.
The base rate of success on this playbook is much grimmer than founders assume. The reason it looks repeatable is survivorship bias: the failed attempts get quietly buried, the successful ones get written up as inevitable.
What category creation actually costs
The accurate cost of a successful category-creation campaign, based on the public-facing efforts I’ve watched play out over ~7 years:
- 3–5 years of sustained narrative work. Books, podcasts, conference keynotes, analyst engagements. Not 18 months.
- One full-time senior person doing nothing but narrative work. Plus a partial commitment from the CEO. Plus a content team to execute. Plus analyst relations spend.
- $3M–$8M of cumulative investment in just the narrative function over the multi-year arc.
- Substantial product investment in the differentiation the narrative is built on. If your product isn’t actually different in a way that justifies the new category name, the narrative collapses on contact with sophisticated buyers.
- Analyst buy-in from Gartner, Forrester, or G2. Without this, the category doesn’t get formalized in buyer-procurement processes and never becomes real outside of your marketing.
The companies I work with — $1M–$10M ARR, often pre-Series B — almost never have the runway or the product depth to credibly execute this. When they try, they typically end up with a name no one in the market uses, a fluffy positioning that doesn’t help sellers, and a marketing budget burned on conference panels.
What works instead at the company stage we serve
Subcategory positioning. Don’t try to create a new category. Position yourself as the leader of a specific subcategory within an existing one — the subcategory should be narrow enough that you can credibly claim leadership, but broad enough that buyers are already searching for it.
Examples of the form (not real companies): “the [thing] for [specific buyer profile].” “The CI/CD platform for game studios.” “The CDP for non-profit fundraising.” “The dbt for analytics engineers at fintech companies.” The category language is borrowed from the established market; the qualifier is what makes you ownable.
The strategic asymmetry: the existing-category leader is too big to credibly serve every subcategory’s specific needs. You can. Build the wedge.
When category creation does make sense
I want to be fair: there are situations where category creation is the right play. Specifically:
- You’re solving a problem that’s genuinely net-new, not just a 30%-better version of an existing solution. (AI-native categories in the past 18 months have created several of these. Most aren’t.)
- You have >$15M in funding and 3+ years of runway with the assumption that category creation is a multi-year arc.
- You have a founder or executive who is a credible category thought-leader in their own right — someone analysts and press already know.
- You can articulate the new category’s name in a single phrase that existing buyers immediately recognize a gap for. If you have to explain why the category needs to exist, you’ve already lost.
If any of those conditions don’t hold, subcategory positioning will move your business meaningfully faster than category creation. Run that play first, and if you outgrow it in 3–4 years and the conditions for category creation have become true, you’ll have a much stronger platform from which to attempt it.
— Marcus
