Antithesis and the Terror of Category Creation: Why Having No Competitors Is Your Worst Nightmare

Antithesis and the Terror of Category Creation: Why Having No Competitors Is Your Worst Nightmare

Every founder dreams of having no competitors. Will Wilson has lived that dream, and he’ll tell you it’s actually a nightmare.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Will Wilson, Co-Founder of Antithesis, an autonomous testing platform, shared a perspective on category creation that most founders don’t hear until it’s too late. When investors ask about competitors and you say “we don’t have any,” you’re not signaling strength—you’re revealing just how hard your journey is about to be.

The Answer That Terrifies Investors

The question comes up in every investor meeting: “Who are your competitors?”

For Antithesis, the honest answer creates an uncomfortable moment. “We basically believe that the category doesn’t exist yet,” Will explained. “Often when we’re talking to investors or potential employees or whatever, they ask us, who are your competitors? And the answer is we don’t think there are any.”

Most founders would deliver this line with pride, as if it proves their brilliance. Will sees it differently. “But people think we’re saying that. And that’s like, haha, look how great we are. No, no. That’s like a really scary answer.”

Why is it scary? Because it reveals the magnitude of the challenge ahead.

The Hidden Value of Competition

Here’s what most founders miss about competition: your competitors are doing half your job for you.

“Having competitors is great,” Will explained, challenging the conventional wisdom that competition is bad. “Like if you have competitors, that’s like evidence that somebody else thinks this problem is worth solving.”

But the benefits go far deeper than simple validation. Competitors become your unwitting partners in market development.

“That’s like other people who are out there educating the marketplace about what you’re doing and like creating a budget category for what you’re doing,” Will shared. “That’s other people who are producing collateral and making the world understand what the problem is.”

Think about what this means practically: When competitors exist, they’re teaching your prospects why they need a solution. They’re convincing CFOs to create budget line items. They’re writing blog posts and giving conference talks that make your sales conversations easier. They’re creating the language and frameworks your buyers use to think about the problem.

“Like, competitors are actually very useful,” Will concluded.

The Reality of Greenfield Territory

When you’re the only one in a space, all that market education work falls entirely on you.

“Having zero competitors, having a brand new greenfield area is like terrifying,” Will admitted. The conventional wisdom celebrates blue ocean strategies and uncontested market spaces. The reality is far more challenging.

Will’s assessment is sobering: “It does mean that the potential upside is really big, but I actually think it makes the problem strictly harder.”

Not slightly harder. Not a bit more challenging. Strictly harder—as in, fundamentally more difficult in ways that can’t be optimized away.

What Category Creation Actually Costs

Creating a new category means solving multiple layered problems simultaneously.

First, you have to build the product. This alone is what most startups focus on. But when you’re creating a category, the product is just the beginning.

Second, you have to create the language. “We call that autonomous testing,” Will explained when describing their category. “Autonomous testing is anything where human beings are not really involved in writing tests at all. All they’re doing is saying what their software is supposed to do and not do. And the computers are doing everything about coming up with the tests and executing them and analyzing the results.”

Notice what’s happening here: Will has to define the entire category before he can even begin to sell. Prospects don’t wake up searching for “autonomous testing” because the concept doesn’t exist in their minds yet.

Third, you have to educate the entire market. While tiny niches like fuzzing and property-based testing exist, “99.99% of the world has never heard of it or done it. And that’s what we’re trying to change,” Will shared.

This isn’t a marketing problem you can solve with better content or more ads. It’s a fundamental education problem that requires years of evangelism.

The Timeline Tax

Category creation imposes a brutal timeline tax that founders rarely anticipate.

For Antithesis, the technical challenges alone required years. “In order to build what we’ve built here, we had to go back to the very foundations of how computers work and change a whole lot of stuff,” Will explained. “We had to write our own hypervisor that is able to run virtual machines in a completely different way than anybody else ever has.”

Building revolutionary technology takes time. But category creation adds another time dimension: market readiness.

“It took a few years, and that’s a lot longer than most startups,” Will acknowledged. “We did actually get early design partners and paying customers as early as we possibly could. But for us, as early as possible was still a few years into the thing.”

Even with paying customers, they stayed in stealth for years more. “Even after we got that first paying customer, we actually stayed in stealth for, like, another three years, just, like, making the thing better, iterating on it, like, slowly growing our customer base through word of mouth.”

This extended timeline creates cascading challenges: you need patient capital, team members who believe in long-term visions, and the ability to resist pressure for premature scaling.

The Burden of Proof

When you’re creating a category, skepticism isn’t just an objection—it’s the default response.

“That’s actually the most common objection,” Will noted about people claiming autonomous testing is impossible. But he’s reframed this challenge into an opportunity.

“There were naysayers who were like, that product that you’re describing is impossible. And that’s the best possible objection to get, I think, as a startup,” Will explained. His reasoning reveals how to navigate category creation skepticism.

“They’re conceding that if it were possible, it would be really useful. If they thought it was useless, they would just say it’s useless. But they’re not saying it’s useless, they’re saying it’s impossible.”

This transforms the sales conversation entirely. “That means we think you’re lying, but implied if you’re not lying. Yeah, I do want to buy that. So, great. Now all I have to do is convince you that I’m not lying and I’m not.”

But here’s the challenge: in an existing category, you only have to prove you’re better than competitors. In a new category, you have to prove the entire concept is possible. The burden of proof is exponentially higher.

When Category Creation Makes Sense

Despite the challenges, Antithesis is pursuing category creation for good reasons. Understanding when it makes sense helps founders make informed choices.

Category creation makes sense when:

The technology is genuinely revolutionary. Antithesis had to write their own hypervisor and rebuild computing foundations. This isn’t incremental innovation—it’s fundamental breakthrough technology.

You have deep domain expertise. Will and his co-founder proved autonomous testing worked at FoundationDB. They weren’t theorizing—they’d already built and used this technology successfully.

The potential upside justifies the cost. Creating autonomous testing as a category could transform how all software is developed. The market size justifies the education investment.

You have patient capital. Antithesis set clear expectations with investors from day one about moonshot risks and long timelines. Without this alignment, category creation becomes impossible.

You can handle being wrong. “Look, this is a moonshot. Like, it’s probably not going to work. You’re probably going to lose all your money,” Will told investors upfront. Category creation requires accepting that failure is the likely outcome.

The Alternative Path

For most startups, entering an existing category is smarter.

When competitors exist, you benefit from established demand, existing budgets, educated buyers, and proven business models. Your challenge becomes differentiation rather than education—a fundamentally easier problem.

The path to success in existing categories is well-trodden: build something 10x better, find an underserved segment, compete on a different dimension. These are hard problems, but they’re known problems with proven solutions.

Category creation, by contrast, is pioneering. You’re hacking through jungle with a machete, not following a trail with a map.

Making Peace With the Terror

Will’s honest assessment of category creation isn’t meant to discourage founders—it’s meant to ensure they understand what they’re signing up for.

“I actually think it makes the problem strictly harder,” he emphasized. But Antithesis is doing it anyway because the mission matters and they have the resources to see it through.

For founders considering category creation, the key insight is this: having no competitors isn’t a feature, it’s a warning sign. It means you’re about to do something exponentially harder than building a normal startup.

If you still want to proceed—if the vision is compelling enough and you have the patience, capital, and conviction required—then embrace the terror. Use it to set realistic expectations with investors, team members, and yourself.

But never mistake lack of competition for a competitive advantage. The real advantage comes from what you build in that greenfield space and whether you can convince the world it’s worth cultivating.

As Will’s journey shows, sometimes the hardest path is worth taking. Just make sure you understand it’s the hardest path before you start walking.