Blog

The Category Name Matters Less Than You Think w/Ryan Bonnici

Equating “category creation” with having an “official” category on a site like G2, Gartner, or TrustRadius seems like common sense. But they’re actually different things. “Category creation” (or my preferred term category design) is about building a market where one previously didn’t exist. It’s more about showing the world a new way of thinking. Of making

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How Category Designers Build Movements w/Mike Volpe

How many different business models are there? Well, 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–he’s actually pursued both strategies. While he’s pursuing a “niche” marketing strategy as CEO of Lola.com, Mike helped built

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Category Design Isn’t Just for Startups

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

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Why Your Company Needs A Strategic Story w/Andy Raskin

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

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Why Terminus Embraces Their Competitors w/Sangram Vajre

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

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The Physical Therapist Who Built a $100M SaaS Company

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

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The CEO’s Important Role in Category Creation

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

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