How many different business models are there? According to Mike Volpe, there are just two. You can either create a new category, or you can carve out a niche in an existing one. Mike would know. While he’s pursuing a “niche” marketing strategy as CEO of Lola.com, Mike helped built the “inbound marketing” category from the ground
When I co-founded a SaaS startup back in 2013, I wish I had known about category design. But back then, it wasn’t on my radar. The seminal book on the topic, Play Bigger, wouldn’t be written for another three years. But if I understood category design at the time, I think we could have taken
Category design isn’t just a business strategy reserved for startups. Take a SaaS company called Narrative Science. They’ve spent nearly ten years playing in the “Natural Language Generation” space. While they’ve seen some solid success, some major plans on their product roadmap recently forced them to rethink how they were positioned. Now, Anna Schena, Director
What’s the most effective way to stand out in a crowded market? Having the “best” technology? Access to the biggest ad budget? Pulling off some amazing “growth hack?” Nope. It’s something deeper than that. It’s the foundation that underpins classics like Toy Story, The Terminator, and Hamlet. It’s how people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and
Startups are supposed to crush competitors, right? Well, maybe… But that’s not how Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist at Terminus, built one of the top SaaS companies out there. Actually, they took the opposite approach. Sangram embraced his competitors (well, metaphorically, anyway), knowing that healthy competition was needed to build out a new market
If you’ve paid any attention to the B2B SaaS space, you’ve probably heard how Drift is one of the fastest-growing companies of all time. But how does Drift do it? There’s no silver bullet, but a big part of their success comes from adopting a business and marketing strategy called category design. Drift isn’t the
What if your doctor told you that she was going to build a $100MM SaaS company? Sounds crazy. But that’s exactly what Heidi Jannenga did. Heidi is the co-founder and president of WebPT, a category-defining SaaS company in the physical therapy space. She’s not a programmer, had no startup experience, and never came near business
Marketers love to talk about category design. And even though that type of positioning is a powerful marketing play, it’s not the type of strategic decision that marketing should pull off alone. In this episode of the B2B Growth Show, I interviewed Chris Orlob, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Gong.io. Gong has been hard
You might think that category design is a positioning strategy reserved only for companies building something entirely new. But for $2B Everbridge, they found that category design can be just as beneficial to large companies as well. Everbridge (traded on NASDAQ as EVBG) had already built a leadership position in a category called Mass Notification
Every marketer needs a superpower. But Christoper Lochhead may have uncovered the greatest superpower of all. It’s something called category design. Category design is the process of building a new space that your company can own and dominate over the long term. It’s about “following your different” instead of trying to be “better.” As the co-author of
