Ready to build your own Founder-Led Growth engine? Book a Strategy Call
Frontlines.io | Where B2B Founders Talk GTM.
Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
18 HR Tech Founders
Category Creation Lessons
Target Budget That Already Exists Instead of Creating Demand From Scratch
When Michael talked about what it actually takes to scale an enterprise business, he was direct about one of the most common traps founders fall into. “You can build a new category, but most budget is sitting in existing categories,” he said, “and so it is far easier to build a business by poaching revenue from existing categories than it is from new categories.” “Just being very clear about where you’re getting budget from is super critical. Because as a VC, it’s hard to underwrite an investment if you don’t know where the growth is going to come from.”
Own the Full Workflow When Defining Your Market Category
When Wingspan evaluated which category to compete in, payments seemed like the obvious choice because buyers were actively searching for payment solutions. But Anthony rejected it. “We’ve debated whether it’s category expansion versus category creation. People are searching for payments because they have a payment problem. But what we learned was some of those services are really commodities.” The real pain, he said, lived earlier in the process: “All of the pain kind of comes before that. So we decided to really hone in on this lifecycle management of contingent work as the category that we’ve developed over time.” For founders choosing a category, the lesson is clear: don’t anchor on where buyers are searching today. Anchor on where the real pain lives. Those are often different places.
Frame Your Category Around the New Provider Type You Make Possible
Jason framed Electives as a category creation play by focusing on the supply side of the market, specifically the type of person delivering the product, rather than the product itself. “When I think of what Uber did, they didn’t build technology to just make taxi drivers’ lives easier. They built a new category. And I think Airbnb is another classic example of how they didn’t build technology to make hotel administrators’ lives easier, they built a new category. And both of them revolved around kind of bringing everyday people into that mix.” That framing directly shaped how Jason described what Electives was building. “We’re not building technology to make the lives of existing corporate trainers easier. We ultimately want to build technology to find the, atypical teacher and bring that entire universe of expertise into the corporate learning space.”
Define Your Category Around the Infrastructure Layer You Own
When Hanns named his category, he deliberately framed it around the data layer rather than any specific HR workflow. “We call this the skills data platform. So basically providing that one platform that ensures that everything talks the same skill language.” That framing positioned Cobrainer below the application layer, as foundational infrastructure rather than a point solution. “What we’re basically focusing on, really is on the vertical of skills data, injecting skills data into all aspects of the HR lifecycle.” The strategic implication of that positioning was significant: “we’re basically the skills data provider. And the same way Google Maps provides its maps data as an API to Uber and Lyft and Uber Eats, we would deliver our skills API to all those HR services that have courses or roles or recruiting use cases.” Naming the category at the infrastructure level made every HR application a potential partner rather than a competitor.
Anchor Your New Category to a Familiar One to Earn Buyer Trust
When explaining what Metaview was building, Siadhal used an existing category as the entry point for buyer understanding. He pointed to conversational intelligence for sales as the reference frame: “people are aware of companies like Gong conversation intelligence for sales calls. There’s obviously a bunch of other sales conversation intelligence tools as well. We sort of think of it as that category. But for hiring with the idea you have a much better sense of who to hire, how your process is going, who your best interviewers are and so on.” The familiar category did the heavy lifting of explanation, while the “but for hiring” framing made the distinction clear. At the same time, he was explicit that this was its own space: “we see it as an additional, as a new category, essentially, as opposed to an existing category.”
Map Your Category to a Budget Line That Already Exists
Jaclyn Chen was direct about how she thought through category positioning: the product needs to live inside a budget the buyer already owns. “As a B2B company, I think you have to think of your market within the confines of a certain budget or line item for companies if you’re going to have customers. And in that case, we’re firmly in the benefits market.” She backed that choice with the scale of the opportunity already sitting inside that line item: “That’s a massive line item that companies spend on. It’s typically the second biggest one after salaries in terms of compensation. So in the US alone, 30% of total compensation is spent on benefits and that sums for about $4 trillion.” Anchoring to an existing budget, she explained, was how a new type of solution could find a home inside a buyer’s existing financial reality.
Position Your Product at the Intersection of Two Existing Categories
When neither existing category fully describes what you’ve built, claiming the space between them can give buyers a mental model for something they haven’t seen before. Dirk Doebler framed Parento’s position this way: “We view ourselves as sort of the cusp of both insurance and like an EAP type program or an employee experience type program.” He connected that directly to building something new: “For us, we’re kind of creating this new category where we’re like a standing up, a whole holistic program that enables them to easily budget for something and make sure that we have a good experience, which is kind of counter to the entire insurance industry.” The result, in his words: “People hate insurance companies. We have a 95 NPS score. People love our program and it’s because we have these wraparound services that take us beyond just an insurance offering.”
Win by Narrowing Your Focus to a Segment Nobody Has Named
Rather than positioning against established players in a crowded market, Kevin identified a segment that incumbents had structurally ignored and named it as its own category. “I would say we did create a category in the small business segment. Nobody was doing what we were doing early enough. They had pieces of it. Sure, some plans were designed for small businesses. There were some record keepers out there that would do it. Nobody really had the full 360 degree integration like we did.” The move wasn’t to challenge the category but to define a corner of it that didn’t yet exist as a coherent offering. “So we put it all together and just define this new market segment where you can get a turnkey 401K for $8. That is something that didn’t exist before.” The result was a market position with no direct competition: “We developed this private market solution in a new category, retirement for small business, where these features didn’t exist for participants that work for small business before, and now they do.”
Turn a Fragmented Service Into a Product to Redefine Your Market
When Remote entered the market, the incumbent solutions were manual, outdated, and built around old assumptions about how employment worked. Marcelo described what changed when they arrived: “The play or the market that existed when we started does not exist today. Or at least not in the same way.” The difference came down to one shift: turning a service into a product. As Marcelo put it, “the feedback that we got was that there’s honestly nothing like this.” For founders entering markets dominated by legacy service providers, the opportunity is often not to compete on their terms but to productize what they’ve left fragmented.
Study Prior Category Creators and Replicate What Worked
Rather than figuring out category creation from scratch, Ben looked directly at companies that had done it before. Gainsight was his primary reference point, and he was specific about what made their approach worth studying: “They built a really strong community in customer success, which was nascent at the time. They did a tremendous amount of education and content development around best practices to codify what great looks like in customer success and create thought leadership.” What Gainsight built extended beyond the product itself, and Ben pointed to that as the key outcome: “They just did a bunch of things that I think others tried to emulate later that proved to be really important, to establish a whole new category in software and to build a brand that wasn’t just associated with a solution, but was associated with the movement.”
Prepare to Educate Your Buyer Before You Can Sell to Them
Charlotte put the category creation challenge plainly: “It’d be really easy if we were disrupting an existing category in my mind, because you can say, oh, we’re just like Workday, we’re just better and cheaper. But this is really a new category.” Without a familiar reference point, every conversation starts from zero. The framing she landed on was built around an analogy buyers already understood: “It’s around how do you customize and make your employee experience personalized to the same level that you care about it for your customers? And I think that it’s a very new way of thinking about employee experience.” Creating a new category means your first job in every sales conversation is building the conceptual frame, before you ever get to the product.
Coin a Category Name That Reflects Where the Market Is Heading
When asked how to classify Jobbatical, Karoli Hindriks pushed back on every existing label available to her. “I think in many ways, we are kind of creating this new category. So what I have labeled it is borderless living technology because if I would say only immigration tech, it doesn’t cover everything that we’re doing.” She grounded the new label in a real behavioral shift rather than a product feature. “Never in human history have people moved as much as they do today across borders. And the way we move has dramatically changed within the last 2030 years. So I believe that there’s actually a new type of category being born. It’s not fully evolved yet, but it’s kind of emerging.”
Build Your Category Strategy Around an Underserved Persona
Tony Jamous described the core mechanic of his category creation playbook as finding a persona the market was ignoring and making them the hero. “It is identifying a persona that is underserved in the market, supporting them and giving them tools to make them superheroes in their business.” From there, he built an entire thought leadership program around that persona’s challenges and success. “We’re leading the way in thought leadership around human centric leadership for distributed companies. That’s our theme and that drives our brand, that drives our business and it’s at the center of our category creation strategy.” The persona became the organizing principle for brand, content, and category positioning simultaneously.
Let Satisfied Customers Carry the Category Creation Message
Andres was direct about the weight of building a new market: “when it comes to creating a category, it is a lot of work in terms of building a market and building awareness.” He described his approach as getting clients who loved the product and building a community around them, with the stated goal of letting those clients do the explaining: “to let them explain what are the benefits that they’ve seen.” He also observed a shift happening in the broader market over time, with larger companies beginning to say “we need to automate more, we need to be more focused on candidate experience. We can’t spend half of our time just finding people.” Andres connected this market movement to the acceleration of category adoption, describing it as “exciting to see” as both smaller and larger companies began treating automation as core to how they operated. That external momentum, in his telling, reinforced what the community of early clients had already been communicating.
Borrow Existing Category Demand When You Lack Capital to Build a New One
Barb was candid about the gap between what Sapia had built and what it would take to make the market understand it. “We really invented a new category, which we call smart interviewer. The issue is it doesn’t exist as a category. And one of the things that we found is it takes a lot of money, a lot of effort, a lot of discipline to build a new category. And we just didn’t have that from a capital perspective.” The workaround was to present the product inside categories that already existed so buyers could place it within their existing mental map. “We had to find ways to present our product in categories that already existed just to help people segment, you know, where do you fit into this HR tech ecosystem?” Barb acknowledged the tension openly: every time they presented to a prospect, the reaction was that the product was far more than the category label suggested.
Commit to Category Creation as a Multi-Year Effort
Sid is direct about what category creation actually requires: “category creation is very arduous and a long term oriented commitment that you have to make as a founding team.” The founding team can start the narrative, but they cannot finish it alone. As Sid explained, “recognize that you’re going to need competitors to come along with you. You’re going to need a community of users to come along with you.” The category only becomes real when the market validates it, and Sid is clear about who ultimately holds that power: “it’s ultimately the customers and the analysts of the world that are going to coin the phrase and really solidify all your hard work.” His advice to any founder attempting this is to stay open: “you may not be right on day one and be open minded to partnership along the way from customers and competitors to really help form a brand new category.”
Align Your Category Name Across Buyer Language, Analyst Language, and Your Vision
Prem Kumar described category naming as a three-way balancing act that founders rarely talk about openly. “As a founder, I’m balancing what buyers think this thing is and what the language they speak with, you know, how analysts are looking at this thing, which should be similar but not always exactly the same. And then where my vision is.” The labels available in the market pulled in different directions: “There’s different categories we get put in or we put ourselves in. I’m seeing chatbot automation as a category, interview analytics, to me, like the category that we align with. So this conversational AI for recruiting.” Picking a category name without reconciling all three inputs means either confusing buyers, getting misclassified by analysts, or building toward a vision the market never recognizes.
Involve Analysts in Shaping Your Category Story From the Start
Mike Fitzsimmons treated analyst relations as a core part of how Crosschq built credibility in a new category. His reasoning was direct: “they’re the ones that are going to be talking about it, especially on the influence with some of these enterprise buyers who are turning to a lot of these analysts as core centers of influence to help them navigate where they need to be investing.” The goal wasn’t just to get coverage but to make analysts active participants in the narrative: “if they’re part of helping you craft the story, and they’re also part of being able to offer feedback and help clarify and that sort of thing.” Mike was unambiguous about the personal commitment this required: “I’m a big believer. I put a lot of energy into that part of the house.”