Building Categories: The Art of Loving What You Don't Want to Hear (Part 1)

The hardest conversations with customers are the most valuable currency in category creation.

Most startups fail at category creation for one reason: they hate what their customers are really trying to tell them.

I've been in the trenches with teams trying to build new categories for over a decade, and here's the uncomfortable truth: success has almost nothing to do with having the right technology or the deepest pockets.

It has everything to do with getting brutally honest customer feedback—and having the humility to act on it.

Category Creator vs. Category Builder: Why the Distinction Matters

Before we dive in, let's define terms. There’s a big difference between category creators and category builders, and understanding it is crucial:

• Category creators come up with the idea, name the space, and define what the category should be. This is mostly vision work—important, but it’s just the starting point.

  
  

• Category builders do the hard work of proving the category is real through customer validation, market adoption, and sustained execution. They turn ideas into traction through thousands of small, often boring, actions.

Creation might be a solo act, but building is fundamentally collaborative. You need early customers willing to take a risk, partners who amplify the message, and competitors who validate the space by copying your approach.

Most importantly, building is where the actual work happens. You can declare a category in a blog post. You build it in support tickets, product iterations, and awkward customer calls.

This article is about the habits and mindsets of category builders—the people who don’t just name the category but make it real.

You Can't Just Be Different: You Need to Solve Unmet Needs with Pioneering Customers

Yes, vision matters. But what turns vision into traction is relentless, messy customer work.

Too many founders think they're Steve Jobs; visionary geniuses who can see the future and drag the market there. But that story is mostly myth, and more importantly, it's unhelpful.

The reality? Most successful categories aren’t birthed from clean vision—they're hammered out in the mud with customers.

I see it all the time: founders show up convinced they’re so different they must create a new category. They spend months polishing pitch decks full of “paradigm shifts” while their product hasn’t been stress-tested, and the problem they're solving isn't recognizable or painful enough to pull budget.

They talk about “transforming entire industries” but can’t get ten customers to increase their willingness to pay.

They’re so focused on being different they forget to be useful.

Real category building is messy and iterative. It starts with solving a real problem better than anything else. Then you expand what's possible. You listen obsessively. The category emerges from the work—not the vision deck.

And here’s what most founders miss: your customers must embrace their role as category builders too. Their insights, outcomes, and willingness to evangelize your new approach are critical. You need pioneers, not just users.

Your Real Job as a Founder (Spoiler: It’s Not Vision)

Here’s what I’ve learned from years as a tech marketing leader: your real job as a founder isn't to be the visionary—it's to be the person who sets the tone for how your entire team handles uncertainty.

Think of it like leading a climb up an uncharted route. You're not just finding handholds—you're modeling calm, adaptive decision-making when the terrain shifts.

Jensen Huang understood this. I know this not by the company’s current stock price but I was one of the lucky ones that was fortunate enough to work with him. He founded NVIDIA in 1993 to make gaming GPUs—but he didn’t stay boxed in. He bet on CUDA in 2006 (a language developers found intriguing, but no one else knew why the hell it mattered), long before anyone cared about AI. He kept 60 direct reports, stayed close to the work, and built the future slowly, then all at once.

That’s category building. It’s not about grand proclamations. It’s about staying close enough to the ground to see what’s changing—and adapting fast.

The Four Traits That Actually Matter

In successful category-building companies, the same four founder traits are most likely showing up:

1. Relentlessly Dedicated

   These founders call every churned customer. They read support tickets. They embrace ugly truths. Panic at the top creates fear of feedback below. Calm persistence creates learning loops.

2. Pragmatically Insightful

   They don’t just collect insights; they build systems to institutionalize them. Across sales, support, product—nothing gets lost.

   
   

3. Ruthlessly Adaptive

   They know when to pivot and when to push.

   
   

4. Inspiring Through Action

   They model what it looks like to be wrong, learn fast, and keep moving.

Miss one of these, and your odds of making it drop fast.

The Grit Reality Check

Forget Hollywood heroics.

I’ve watched brilliant teams with promising tech flame out because they couldn’t sustain the boring work of customer feedback. They wanted the “aha” moment without the discipline that creates it.

The winners treat feedback like archaeologists treat pottery shards. Every insight matters. You can’t afford to ignore even one.

Marketing’s Real Job (Hint: It’s Translation)

Marketing in a category creation effort isn’t about promotion—it’s about translation.

Engineering talks in features.

Sales talks in solutions.

Marketing translates all of it into outcomes buyers care about.

When that translation fails, you get six months of product development based on misunderstood signals.

The best marketers don’t just support the category narrative; they create the language that shapes how people think.

Salesforce gave us “customer success.”

Slack gave us “channels” and “workspaces.”

Airtable gave us “no-code.”

When your competitors start using your words, you’ve won.

You Can’t Buy Your Way to Category Leadership

This one stings: You can’t buy credibility you haven’t earned.

I’ve seen companies blow their Series A on flashy “category marketing” campaigns—with three paying customers.

Big budgets don’t make you a leader. Sustained execution does.

NVIDIA didn’t declare themselves the AI computing leader. They built and invested in GTC, grew an ecosystem, and, most importantly, proved GPUs could do more than graphics.

Now compare that to Grammarly.

They created the AI writing assistant category—but newer players like Jasper, Notion AI, and Claude have quickly seized the narrative. Why?

Because Grammarly stopped evolving the category. They built a product, not a movement. Others built positioning, use-case specificity, and better narratives around what they help users achieve.

Categories aren’t trophies you win once. They're positions you earn daily.

Traditional Marketing vs. Category Marketing

This is important. If you’ve made it this far, I know you’ll appreciate this:

Traditional marketing assumes buyers know what they’re shopping for.

Category marketing assumes they don’t.

That means your playbook isn’t “build awareness and drive leads”—it’s “teach people a new way of thinking.”

Less selling, more teaching.

The Buyer Reality That Changes Everything

Buyers don’t care about your category. They care about their problems. More specifically: their unmet needs—the stuff current solutions can’t fix.

That’s the real opening for new categories.

Founders who lead with category talk often confuse and alienate early buyers. I've seen too many waste six months pitching a “revolutionary platform” while their prospects nod politely and never converts.

Change the story.

• Start with the problem your buyer already has.

• Show why existing approaches don’t solve it well enough.

• Introduce your approach as the logical upgrade.

• Name the category only after you’ve earned the right.

The Sellability vs. Technical Excellence War

Every founder building a new category hits this fork in the road: Do you optimize for technical elegance or sellability?

After watching this battle play out dozens of times, I can tell you. Sellability wins.

You're not just selling a product. You're selling a new way of thinking. If people can’t explain your value clearly, you won’t scale, never mind build a category. It’s important to remember:

HipChat was more advanced than Slack.

Salesforce wasn’t the most robust CRM.

Snowflake won not on features, but clarity: "Built for the cloud."

Build technical excellence quietly. Sell the transformation loudly.

The Timing Trap Nobody Talks About

Here’s a paradox to think about: You can declare a category before product-market fit (PMF), but it won’t stick until you actually have PMF.

Meanwhile, creating a category can help achieve PMF (differentiation)

and make it harder (market education burden).

It’s like learning to drive while teaching the world what cars are for.

The Double Burden Problem

Most early-stage teams don’t realize this: You’re not just proving your product works.

You’re proving your category deserves to exist.

That’s a brutal, resource-intensive double burden.

The best teams treat category creation as a PMF accelerator, not a separate initiative. They craft narratives that make their PMF path easier to explain, not harder.

The Resource Reality

If you're underfunded, it’s okay to delay category creation. Nail PMF, then build the narrative around what’s working.

But wait too long, and a better-funded competitor will define the category for you.

If you have runway, pursue both—but know the tradeoffs. Category work without traction is just expensive theater.