Somewhere in the last few years, category creation stopped being bold advice and became default advice. Every founder deck has a slide claiming a brand-new market with the company parked right at the center of it. We see it all the time at Jacob Tyler with new App ideas, new products, and more. Since we have integrity, we do our best to explain what we see to our prospects and clients. I mean after all, it is usually way easier to see the forest through the trees when you’re not already IN the forest. We’ve sat through a lot of those decks. The instinct is understandable, and it’s almost always aimed at the wrong problem.
Why everyone suddenly wants a new category
Look at most markets right now and everything blurs together. The palettes match, the taglines rhyme, the homepages could swap logos and nobody would notice. When you feel invisible inside your own category, inventing a fresh one sounds like the escape hatch. Be the only fish in the pond instead of one more fish in the sea.
The advice has a bible, too. Play Bigger made “category king” a boardroom phrase, and the promise underneath it is genuinely seductive: define the game and you get to win it. So founders reach for the manifesto, coin a three-word phrase with “the first” in front of it, and stake out ground nobody asked them to claim. The move feels strategic. Usually it’s just avoidance wearing a strategy costume.
Category creation is real. It’s just rare, slow, and expensive.
Let’s be fair to the idea. Category creation works, and when it works the economics are absurd. Play Bigger’s research found that the category king tends to capture around 76% of the category’s market value, leaving everyone else to split the remaining quarter. That’s the number on the slide. That’s the dream.
Here’s the footnote nobody reads aloud. Those wins take six to ten years, and they cost more than most companies will ever spend on brand. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Workday didn’t name a category and cash the check. They spent more than a decade teaching a market to want something it didn’t know to ask for. That’s the actual job of building a category, and it’s a different job from naming one. Most “category creation” in the wild is renaming a subcategory, rebadging a feature, or printing a manifesto and hoping investors nod. Naming a market and owning one are not the same move. One takes an afternoon. The other takes a decade.
What you probably have is a positioning problem
Here’s the part that stings, because it’s less glamorous and far more common. If buyers keep confusing you with a cheaper competitor, you don’t have a category gap. You have a positioning problem. And positioning is fixable this quarter, not this decade.
Positioning answers three plain questions: who you’re for, what problem you actually solve, and why you over every other option on the buyer’s list. The distinction matters more than the vocabulary makes it sound. A twelve-million-dollar company whose prospects can’t tell it apart from three lookalikes doesn’t win by inventing a category. It wins by getting specific about the one buyer who feels a particular problem more sharply than anyone else, and saying that out loud, everywhere, until it sticks.
This is the same reason most rebrands fail: the company reaches for new visuals when the real gap is a decision nobody made about where the brand sits. Getting seen isn’t a design default. It’s what you force into the work on purpose. A new category is a bet on the future. Clear positioning is a fix for the present.
How to tell which one you’re actually doing
There’s a quick honest test, and it only has one question. Does the market you’re describing already have buyers with budget and intent? Or would you have to teach them the problem exists before anyone reaches for a wallet?
If the demand already exists and you’re losing it to sameness, you have a positioning job. Get clear, get specific, get chosen. If you’d genuinely have to create the demand, and you have a decade of runway and the budget to teach a market from scratch, then maybe, maybe, you’ve got a category worth building. Most companies have the first problem and reach for the second answer. It’s more fun to announce a category than to admit your pitch is muddy.
So before you go build a category, get honest about whether anyone’s asking for it yet. If they already are and they just can’t tell you apart from the pack, that’s a positioning problem, and it’s the faster one to fix. If you’d rather not sort that out alone, that’s the conversation we like having first.