What are the biggest mistakes you made when creating a category

Waiting too long to layer in the tried and true tactics that work.

I mentioned in another response that traditional tactics such as outbound prospecting or PPC did not convert well early in our years building Gainsight and Customer Success. Reason being, no one knew what CS was nor were they doing much searching online!

However once your category tips, game on. I regret waiting 1-2 quarters too late to ramp our paid media spend, double down on SDRs, etc.

One of the biggest challenges we had in the early days was competing against Microsoft. They are the grand-daddy of identity in that they created Active Directory, which has been the authoritative directory for every enterprise for decades. As you can imagine, they wanted to hold on to this critical IT control point for as long as possible as the world moved to the cloud, so they came out with something called Azure Active Directory, which is a directly competitive product to Okta’s.

The reason why this was a huge challenge early on was the integration that Microsoft identity has with Office365, their flagship product. So, if the world is moving to SaaS software, well, the number one initiative for every company out there is to get Office365 deployed. How do you do that? Using Azure Active Directory. So, we had to compete not only against the 800lb gorilla’s directly competitive product, but we ALSO had to deal with positioning ourselves as best for deploying the #1 killer app - Office365.

So, early on, we tried the head-to-head route. But, as you can imagine, the results were mixed as we basically played into Microsoft's hands ("we can deploy Office365 too, but we can do it faster than Microsoft" ... yeah, that didn't win the deal). So, we evolved the playbook. Over the last few years, we’ve had an 80% win rate. Since everyone has asked me at some point, ‘how did you beat Microsoft’, I thought I’d write down our playbook in a nutshell. Below are 10 steps we took to win vs. the market incumbent and 800lb gorilla. Attached is a more detailed walkthrough of each step:

1. Start with a strong founder insight
2. Address a big market with lots of room to expand and/or pivot
3. Build a compelling, simple-to-use ‘core’ product that people love
4. Make IT the transformative hero
5. Sell on customer value
6. Invest in customers first with a maniacal focus on their success
7. Tell your story through the lens of your customers
8. Rewrite the rules to go beyond your competitor’s capabilities
9. Build an ecosystem moat
10. Expand into disruptive market adjacencies

Category creation is a journey into the unknown. There are rarely clear right or wrong answers at the beginning so brace yourself for the ride. 

Here are a few areas to think about: 

- Category name. You want to find a name that represents the new world and the promise of the category while making it understandable and relatable. Don't be tempted to narrowly represent your product with the name. Think big. 

- Start early with the analysts. Your efforts will likely not move the needle for the first 12-18 months but keep investing in analyst education to help shape their POV.

- Category creation is a company-wide effort. Don't think of it as just the responsibility of the marketing team. Category creation requires the entire company - from sales, CS, and marketing to engineering, implementation, and HR - to rally behind the story and evangelize it with customers, prospects, partners, candidates, and vendors. It's that level of commitment and consistency that is required for the market to take notice. 

- Category creation is not for everyone. Not every new product or solution deserves a new category. Think long and hard if you are really in the business of a new category or disrupting an existing one. 

One of the biggest category creation mistakes is trying to create your own category — when there's already a category you could join and dominate as the leader.

Many of the "category creation" companies people often trumpet didn't really create the categories from scratch. They took emerging categories, and explained the category and their concomitant leadership in the category better than anyone else.

It is relatively easy to get it wrong when creating a new category, the complication is in the word "new". So it is very important to make sure you understand all the implications for your business to reduce the possibility of failure. Here is in my opinion some of the most common mistake done by organizations trying to expand to new categories.

1. Bad resource management: You must make sure you understand the economics of this decision for your business in every way: People, money, know-how and time.

2. It work once it will work again: You need to treat this almost as a new business and no a new product line. What help you succeed before could be a good north star, but bear in mind you are entering unexplored waters and you must be smart and humble to learn before going all in.

3. We don't need new expertise: Depending on the situation of your business, you might need to think on recruiting new people to help you understand this new process. It might seem something you would want to safe money at the beginning but not having the right expertise could be the difference of succeeding or not when creating a new category.

4. Too big too far: If possible try to stay within a sensible range of your main activity. If you want to be over disruptive you need to understand that you will need to consider more of everything (more resources, more knowledge, more variables to fail) to make it happen.