Paul Lacey

Category naming is more art than science. It involves a deep understanding of your solution space, the language of your existing and prospective customers, and the founder's intuition into the vision for the business. Conventional wisdom suggests that a category name be no more than three words, and should capture the use case of your product as opposed to just features/benefits. Examples: Customer Relationship Management, Marketing Automation, Direct Care Administration. I would highly recommend doing user research in defining your category name to avoid any language that has unanticipated triggers for your prospects. For example, when defining Hint's category, our initial instinct was to define Direct Care Plan Administration (DPA). Upon user testing, however, we found our users (Direct Care Physicians) reacted very strongly to the word "Plan" as being too closely associated with health insurance - an industry they were actively trying to distance themselves from. Based on this overwhelmingly universal feedback, we decided to pivot our category name to Direct Care Administration to capture similar concepts without the trigger word. It's also possible to define sub-categories within a larger context, which can shortcut the educational component needed in developing a completely new context. Example: The Electric Toothbrush is a sub-category of the Toothbrush. Thus it can ride on all the previous consumer knowledge about toothbrushes and focus more on the key differentiators from previous solutions.