What You’ll Find This Week

If your product is just “better,” you’re already losing. This week, we’re digging into why great startups don’t just compete…they redefine the game entirely. We break down the discipline of category creation and why it’s the single most overlooked strategy in early-stage ventures. If you’re still chasing traction, this is your permission to shift focus and start building belief.

Here’s what you’ll find:

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This Week’s Article

Innovation should be getting easier. We have more technology at our disposal, cheaper resources for execution, and (of course) AI. But the result isn’t originality. It’s a flood of sameness.

Interchangeable teams building interchangeable products. All chasing the same story. As a founder, how do you get anyone to notice what you’re building in a sea of lookalikes?

A great message, a great product, and even great innovation are no longer enough to guarantee your success. The startups that truly stand out today are the ones brazen enough to change the rules of the game…and own the story behind it.

The simple-but-painful truth is: the market won’t care about your product. Not until people understand why this new product should exist in the first place.

That means you’re not in the product business.
You’re in the belief business.

Most founders think their job is to build a better widget. In fact, just yesterday I heard the age-old fallacy, “If you build it, they will come.” yet again. So they polish features, stack integrations, obsess over speed and UX. But all that work lands flat when you're solving a problem people don't think they have. (Or worse, one they think is already solved.)

And if you're telling the existing market the same story made incrementally better, you're not shifting anything. You're reinforcing the very system you're trying to out-do.

How many times have you heard a venture-builder talk about how they’ve built something meaningful, but “the market doesn’t get it yet.” Guess what? That’s not a product issue. It’s a framing issue.

If people can’t envision the same shift, the same value, and the same reason to change, they won’t feel the urgency. And without urgency, your product looks like just another option offering incremental improvements.

The companies that land on top don’t stop at product creation. They create a new product and tell a story that reframes the problem around it, one that defines a new category and makes their solution feel both urgent and inevitable.

And the difference isn’t subtle.

Category-first startups don’t just launch features. They change what people believe is possible. They shift the way people see the world. They give language to a new problem. One that only their product makes solvable.

Category creation requires getting people to say, "I never knew I needed that"

That shift in belief changes how people evaluate every other option. Once they adopt your lens, they’ll start seeing every legacy solution as part of the old problem. Your product becomes the only answer that makes sense. And, in doing so, creates a mentality of "Now that I know this exists, I can't live without it."

In approaching category creation, it's important to remember that disruption does not mean setting out to out-innovate, out-market, or out-price the existing competition. True disruption isn’t a result of trying to take over existing market share. It happens when companies challenge the assumptions that underpin a market.

Disruption happens when you introduce the world to a new problem and its solution. And that's precisely what creating a new category does. It forces a shift in how people interpret the world. It sets the stage for a new kind of solution that does not just look or feel better. It feels necessary, or even inevitable.

You're not just building a product. You're building belief in a new reality. One that only your product makes possible.

That’s the essence of category design. It requires conviction in a shift no one fully sees yet. You're not reacting to change. You're declaring it.

And yes, people will push back. Analysts will question the data. Investors will squint with that contemplative frowny-face. Customers won’t get it…until they do.

But once they see it, they won't be able to unsee it. And when the market finally catches up, you’ll be the one who defined what the future is supposed to look like.

Your product matters. But your product alone won’t create the shift we’re describing.

Founders who succeed understand that product creation and category creation are two sides of the same coin. You're not just building a thing. You're building the context that makes that thing matter.

Here’s how to approach it…

Design the shift first. Then show the world the solution you're building.

Once you've done the work of spotting the shift, naming the friction, declaring the future, naming the category, and telling the story…the hard work begins.

Now, you have to live it.

Because leading a category doesn’t mean waiting for consensus. It means demonstrating that the future you described is already here.

That looks like:

People will resist it at first. They’ll misunderstand it. They’ll demand you sound more like what they already know.

Your job is to stay the course.

When your narrative and your actions stay in sync, something powerful happens. The market begins to orient around you. They see the world through your eyes. And once they do, they don’t go back.

That is what it looks like to lead a new category.

Most people don’t buy better solutions. They stick with familiar ones. They know the problem they’ve got, and they trust the tools they’ve always used.

Inertia isn’t your enemy. It is their default.

If you want to earn customer attention, you can’t just shout louder. You have to make them feel something they hadn’t noticed before. You have to shine a light on a problem they didn’t realize they had.

Once that problem is visible, it’s hard to ignore. And if your product is the only thing built to solve it, everything else starts to look outdated by comparison.

That’s not messaging. That’s not positioning. It’s category creation.

You are not convincing the market.
You are confronting it.

And when the shift clicks, they won’t be able to unsee it. Or un-need you.

Case Study

Gong didn’t set out to build another sales tool. They built a new lens for how companies understand customer conversations. And they named the category that lens created: Revenue Intelligence.

Instead of positioning themselves as a CRM add-on or a better meeting recorder, Gong reframed the problem. The pitch wasn’t that sales teams needed to record more calls. It was that the most critical insights in a company: how deals are won and lost, were buried in conversations nobody was analyzing. Gong turned that blind spot into a defined problem. And in doing so, they created the demand for an entirely new category of product.

This wasn’t simply clever messaging. Gong aligned their product, marketing, sales, and investor narrative around one clear idea: if you can’t see what’s happening in your revenue pipeline, you’re flying blind. Every part of the company was designed to reinforce the idea that "revenue intelligence" wasn’t a feature. It was the new standard.

By naming the shift and claiming the narrative around it, Gong didn’t just grow fast. They grew on their own terms. Competitors were left trying to catch up to a category they didn’t define. And customers began asking for "a Gong" instead of "a call analysis tool." That’s the power of framing the game instead of trying to win someone else’s.

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