Most startups aim to create and win in a category. Very few actually do.
Companies that achieve it grow faster, shape how markets think, influence how buyers evaluate solutions, and impact how investors assign value.
Competing in a category means accepting its rules. Category leaders change the game entirely.
One of the preeminent examples is Salesforce. When the company first launched, they didn’t just build better CRM software. Rather, they redefined it, rallying around and differentiating their cloud-based service at a time when on-premise solutions dominated. That shift reframed buyer expectations entirely, and positioned Salesforce as the default leader.
Of course, this only works if the company is doing something genuinely new. I’ve worked with many founders who were convinced that they were “creating a category”, when they’re really repackaging an existing one. But this is where a fractional communications leader can come in, providing a critical and strategic perspective as an advisor and partner.
But when done right, category leadership delivers stronger investor positioning, narrative control, pricing power, and faster market adoption. It’s a lofty ambition, but it can pay off for those startups who are truly doing something new, innovative, and differentiated from the status quo.
Most startups start with product differentiation, focusing on specs and features. Few make the leap to category thinking.
Product thinking asks: What do we do better?
Category thinking asks: How should this market be understood?
This is where most companies get it wrong: they treat communications as output, not strategy. For example, Uber didn’t market itself as a better taxi service. Instead, it reframed transportation as “on-demand mobility.” That framing unlocked a much larger narrative and market, with other companies including Lyft, Bolt, DiDi, Grab and Ola all joining the space both in the US and in other corners of the globe.
Uber was one of the first to kick off the “on-demand” category as a whole, helping to normalize the idea that anything can be instantly summoned from a mobile device, from food delivery (DoorDash, Grubhub), groceries (Instacard, Gopuff), services (TaskRabbit), and others. The result was the “on-demand economy” projected to reach $1.4 trillion by 2030.
Assuming you’re building something new, here’s what it takes. Below is a deceptively simple framework, because nailing the details requires a great deal of research, analysis, strategy, insights, development and alignment–both with the head of communications leader and the executive team.
Category leaders don’t start with solutions—they start with sharper problem definition.
This often means:
I worked with Strivr as it expanded its virtual reality offering beyond sports into the enterprise. Rather than leading with the technology, the company positioned itself as a leader in the “immersive learning” category, focusing on the challenge of delivering effective, scalable workforce training and retention. VR became the enabler, but the narrative centered on outcomes: better learning, measurable performance, and training at scale through immersive content and analytics.
A strong category name should be :
(Just think of the acronym “SOME” for the above; to build a category you need to be something, right?) Choosing the right set of words for the category creates the market, and the movement behind it.
When I worked with WalkMe, the goal was to introduce and solidify their position as a “digital adoption platform”--a new term aimed at transforming them to be a true category pioneer and leader. The company was already a Series E startup at this stage, but had a low and even negative brand profile, as one of the only high-authority media articles was in TechCrunch, where the reporter had compared their technology to Microsoft Clippy. Certainly not a flattering comparison when most people who used Clippy found it to be immensely annoying.
I worked to reframe WalkMe as from a feature-driven tool to a mission-critical platform, contributing to a $1 billion valuation ahead of its IPO. The “digital adoption platform” stuck, and we saw media, analysts, investors, and competitors steadily use the term. A category exists as soon as the market repeats it back to you.
Category leadership doesn’t just describe one company. It’s an ecosystem.
I once set up an interview with the cofounder of a startup with a reporter at Fortune magazine. When asked about the company’s competitors, he said they didn’t have any. “If you have no competitors, then you have no market,” she retorted.
Even companies that are creating something truly unique have competitors–even if it’s the status quo.
Similarly, from a marketing communications standpoint, category leadership isn’t a single message, but a sustained exposure to the same idea across every touchpoint. This includes consistent messaging across channels, where a company’s website, investor deck, product marketing, sales decks, and other materials need to all reinforce the same category narrative.
In early and growth stages, the founder is the face of the category. In the case of Airbnb, Brian Chesky’s public narrative consistently reinforced its positioning as not just as a booking platform, but as redefining travel and belonging. That narrative showed up in interviews, keynotes, and product storytelling, going beyond the “what’ and “how” of the product to articulate the “why” behind the category.
High-growth category leaders also use their category to shape how the industry thinks. In the venture capital world, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has built an entire media engine around its investment thesis. Their content defines markets, trends, and categories before they fully emerge. Their perspectives are published not by the media, in their own channels, as well as by third-party voices, creating an engine that reinforces their perspectives from multiple angles.
You can define a strong category, but if your product, sales, marketing, and PR don’t reinforce it, the narrative breaks down fast.
I worked with the executive leadership team of a HR tech startup, aligning across product, sales, marketing, customer success, and HR. After solidifying the company’s category, positioning and messaging and ensuring alignment across all execs, this then trickled into all materials, making it clear for prospects and customers to understand.
The fastest way to kill a category is internal inconsistency. Alignment is strategic and operational. And it requires deliberate ownership of the category narrative across every function, especially as the company evolves and scales.
Category leadership lives or dies in how consistently the story shows up.
Most companies don’t have a positioning problem; they have a translation problem. The strategy exists, but it gets diluted across decks, campaigns, and conversations.
This is where a fractional Head of Communications can close messaging and storytelling gaps, and enforce consistency across channels.
If your story isn’t showing up the same way everywhere, it’s time to fix it. Get in touch with me to set up a discussion.
