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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
18 Data Technology Founders
Category Creation Lessons
Select a Category Name That Opens a Different Budget Conversation
Logan’s first attempt at positioning Datalogz used familiar language: BI governance. The problem was immediate. They “quickly got lumped into another category that was already pretty mature around data governance,” which put them in a competitive conversation they could not win and triggered objections from buyers who already had governance tools in place. The naming decision to use BIOps was deliberate, and the logic was explicitly commercial: calling it BIOps “allows us at enterprises to focus on a different kind of budget and also have less competition of the tools that we’re going head to head against versus using a common term that already exists.” Buyers who heard “governance” said they already had a solution. Buyers who heard “BIOps” had a different conversation entirely. The name you choose determines which budget you get access to and which competitors show up in the deal.
Redefine Your Category Around the Outcome Buyers Actually Want
Rina didn’t reject the data access category label, she reframed what it meant. “Our category can be classified as data access, but we’re definitely changing it. So up until now, data access included security and privacy solutions that aim to restrict and limit users, which makes sense because existing data protection solutions are not technological.” The entire category had been built around a constraint, not an outcome. PVML’s redefinition pointed directly at what buyers actually wanted on the other side of that constraint: “The first technology that actually helps unlock more data for analysis without altering it and without risking it.” Rina summarized the repositioned category in six words: “It’s data access, but it’s enabling instead of limiting.” When the existing category is defined by what it prevents, the opportunity is to redefine it around what it makes possible.
Scope Your Positioning Down to the Problem Competitors Ignore
Broad category labels invite instant comparison. When Ethan described Portable as a data integration company, the market response was immediate: “Aren’t there a hundred data integration companies?” Narrowing the label to ETL didn’t help either: “Aren’t there 30 ETL companies that all do the same thing?” The positioning problem wasn’t the product, it was the frame. Ethan’s solution was to stop competing in the category and own a specific gap: “A lot of it was scoping things down. Our focus on the long tail, on custom integrations that no one else wants to build. It aligns both with what is our beachhead, but also what is our expertise.” When your positioning describes a problem competitors have actively walked away from, comparison becomes irrelevant.
Create a Neutral Industry Body to Drive Category Standards
Dan made a deliberate decision to route category standards work through a separate nonprofit rather than push it directly under the company banner. The reasoning was practical: “Rather than Cinchy Inc. pushing for standards, it’s going through the alliance where we’re working with other organizations and data privacy experts and other such things. And it creates a lot less friction and then anyone can join.” A vendor-led standards push carries an obvious credibility problem – competitors and partners have little reason to participate when the originator stands to benefit commercially. By creating a neutral vehicle, Dan made participation easy and the effort legible as an industry initiative. The long-term positioning logic was explicit: “We are creating the category at all costs, knowing that if we’re the ones that are the driving force behind that and accelerating this inevitability is going to put us in a really good position regardless.” The company that writes the standards wins, even when others adopt them.
Map the Maturity Gap Between Your Market and a More Advanced Adjacent One
Roy’s category thinking started with a concrete observation about where data engineering stood relative to software engineering. He noted that “the data engineering world is probably around a decade behind the regular or software application engineering world in terms of its observability and monitoring tools,” pointing to the explosion of APM tools in software engineering as a reference point that data engineering had not yet reached. He then mapped the existing attempts to fill that gap: “around four or five years ago, a new category emerged. That’s probably the second generation of data quality tools. A new category of data quality emerged and “a lot of the solutions there again approach the problem [for the ecosystem that’s very heavy on the data warehouse architecture and very focused on the data quality itself].” The partial coverage of existing solutions defined the opening. When you can point to a more mature adjacent market and show exactly where your market lags behind it, you have a precise location for a new category.
Prepare for a Longer Sales Cycle When Buyers Have No Prior Behavior
Selling into a new category is a fundamentally different motion than selling a better version of something buyers already do. Yarden framed the contrast clearly: “If you make something 10x better, like Superhuman vs Gmail, it’s kind of easy adoption, because it’s like, you’re already doing this. Here’s my 10x better solution.” When the buyer has no existing behavior to upgrade, the sales process changes shape entirely. As Yarden put it, “when you’re saying you’re not already doing this, but you should be doing it, there’s a lot more explanation and convincing, talking about the problem in multiple ways.” That education burden also extends to validation: “until you actually see usage and things like that, you don’t know for sure if you’re onto something because until then, it’s really just the hypothesis.” When you are creating a category, winning the first customers requires proving the problem exists before you can prove your solution works.
Answer the Why Now Question Before Any Investor Asks It
Building a new category requires more than a compelling product story. You need to explain why this category couldn’t have existed before. Ryan identified the question most founders fumble: “they often miss the most important one, which is the why now? Right? And it’s like, what’s changed? Why hasn’t this happened 20 years ago?” He grounded his own answer in a specific technological shift rather than market demand: “the tech that’s happening now is AI, LLMs and it’s like this is the secular shift.” The secular shift framing clarified the competitive window, because a category that only became possible recently is one where established players have no structural advantage. A compelling why now explains timing as a function of capability, not ambition.
Assign Every Function a Distinct Role in Building the Category
Barr was unambiguous about where category creation responsibility sits: “This is 100% a company wide thing. So I think it’s very hard to create categories. Rather than leaving it to marketing to carry alone, she gave each function a specific mandate. “Our product team, a private engineering team, is defining what the product should look like for this category. And our marketing team is responsible for spreading or speaking with customers or building the awareness around the fact that there is a solution for this problem. And then our sales and customer success team are helping make sure that the customers that we work with are happy and can see a ton of value.” The result was an organization where every team understood its contribution to the same goal. “I do view this as a company wide effort. Every single function of the team and every single organization contributes to it. We have a very clear sense of how we do that on every level.” When category creation is treated as a marketing problem rather than a company problem, the execution almost always falls short.
Ground Your Messaging in the Customer Problem You Solve
Category boundaries in emerging markets are often genuinely contested, and Ian made a deliberate choice to stop letting that ambiguity drive Tonic’s messaging. Rather than trying to settle debates about how to define or label the category, the team oriented around what customers actually needed: “What we really like to do is actually talk more about the customers problems and what do they need, and what’s the bar for them to be productive and get value out of the data that we’re producing.” The category label still served a functional purpose as shorthand, but it was subordinate to the customer outcome conversation: “What attributes of the data do they need as opposed to, is this synthetic data? Is this mass data, but for shorthand to help folks understand sort of the domain that we’re talking about? Yes, synthetic data is something that we talk about all the time.” Buyers do not care how you define your category. They care whether you understand their problem and can solve it.
Bring Analyst Firms Into Your Category Narrative Early
Ariel Katz engaged Gartner and Forrester directly rather than waiting for them to recognize the category shift on their own. He brought a specific argument: the existing category no longer fit, and the market had moved: “you go to Gartner and Forrester and so on and really try to talk with them about, hey, maybe ABI, which is the current category of pure BI, which is obviously not something that we fit well into right now, but that’s where we live. Can we actually kind of diverge from that and maybe create another category next year?” The engagement was sustained and grounded in customer evidence: “really starting to work with them on interviews, writing and really making the case of what we’re seeing with our customers and why we think this is the right time basically to look at the world of BI and that paradigm differently.” The argument he made to analysts centered on a fundamental buyer shift: “this is more of a developer-first word than it is analyst-first word, like it was ten years ago.” Bring analysts into the conversation early and give them the customer evidence they need to move with you.
Align Your Technology Narrative With Existing Analyst Categories
In a market crowded with competing terminology, data fabric, data mesh, data products, Saket observed that Gartner placed Nexla within the data fabric segment, which he described as “technologies that are leveraging metadata or the underlying information from data systems to make the regular data operations easier.” Rather than fighting that placement, he explained how Nexla’s technical approach mapped to it: “we abide by the intelligence, like unlearning from the system, observe the information and then automatically try to do things, which is a data fabric approach.” Saket was candid that the terminology landscape had created real confusion for buyers: “we’ve as an industry confused our customer base with terminology, right, left and center.” When buyers are already disoriented, landing inside a recognized analyst category gives them a reference point without requiring the vendor to educate the entire market from scratch.
Define What It Looks Like to Win Your Category Before You Get There
Michel set a specific and concrete target for what category leadership would look like for Airbyte: “Our goal in the next three years is establishing ourselves as the moment you buy your warehouse, the moment you need to move data from one place to the next, it’s clear in everybody’s mind that the default solution is Airbyte.” The benchmark he used was how previous technology categories had consolidated around a single default. “When you were looking ten years ago as well, people wanted to do big data, the solution was, okay, we need to use Hadoop, and then it becomes, oh, yes, we need to use Spark. It’s about really becoming that standard so that it becomes weird to choose another technology.” A vague ambition to “win the market” gives a team nothing to orient around. A concrete picture of what default looks like gives them something to build toward.
Pick One Beachhead Segment Before Trying to Define a Category
In a large, established market with multiple viable customer types, the instinct to pursue all of them simultaneously kills category clarity. Vinoth found that operating in a space with data ingestion, optimization, and query engines meant “we could be building in many different directions and targeting many different types of users,” and that narrowing down to a specific wedge, borrowing explicitly from Crossing the Chasm, was “the biggest challenge.” The path to that wedge was direct experimentation across segments: “we’ve distilled it down to like three customer profiles today, but we started with something like seven and then we tried to experiment with it and we took a lot of calls in different segments to actually narrow this down more and crystallize the value proposition.” You cannot define a category for everyone at once; you define it by winning a specific segment first.
Welcome Competitors as Evidence Your Market Is Real
Most founders treat competitor presence as a problem to manage. Daniel argues the opposite. “If you’re trying to go it alone to create a category, it’s a lonely road. And I think there are countless companies that have hit potholes along that road and frankly haven’t succeeded or have had mixed success.” Daniel pointed to Zoom as a company that won precisely because Webex spent years educating buyers first. “Other companies have paved that road and allowed Zoom to just drive straight down the road.” Not every founder reaches this conclusion naturally. “The realization and the comfort that you’re describing there of the competitor needs to exist in order for the market to exist is something that not all founders grasp.” First movers create the market; second movers capitalize on it.
Reframe an Existing Category Around What Cloud Makes Newly Possible
Ajay Kulkarni made a deliberate choice to redefine an existing category rather than declare a new one. “What we’re doing at Timescale is we’re redefining the database category. And I think databases have been around for 40 years. I think the rise of the cloud has made some parts of the database operations easier. But I still feel like it’s kind of V1, and I think there’s an opportunity to really rethink the database in the cloud.” The strategic logic was that a macro shift had changed what was possible, but the category narrative had not caught up. He grounded the argument in a broader market claim: “every company today is either a software company or is becoming a software company or is getting replaced by software company.” From there, the category redefinition had a foundation: “we’re redefining the database category by really taking advantage of the cloud and really focusing on the developer and the job to be done in particular.”
Let Customer Feedback Determine Your Category Language
Sarah started without a clear category label, unsure whether customers would see Seek as business intelligence or something else entirely. “[When we were starting out, we weren’t sure] if customers were going to see us as business intelligence or something else, but it became clear that customers see us as a fifth layer. Before the phrase generative AI, we were calling ourselves more just AI software. A new category of working with data.” As the market shifted and new language emerged, she adopted it to describe what customers were already experiencing. “On our website now, it says generative AI for data. We’re generative AI. That is a completely new category of software that didn’t exist.” The category name came last, not first, shaped by what customers understood and what the market made legible. Your category language should reflect how buyers already perceive you, not how you wish they would.
Commit to a Category Name Early and Stay Consistent With It
When Alation needed to name what it was building, there was no existing market language to borrow. Satyen described the starting point plainly: “We didn’t have a category name, so we just like literally put one in.” The first attempt, “data accessibility,” failed immediately. His marketing lead pointed out it may sounded like data for people with disabilities, so the team moved on. They landed on “data catalog,” and from that point the discipline was consistent. Satyen reflected that over time “we became far more intentional. We’re very consistent about the name.” Picking the wrong name first is less damaging than constantly changing it. Buyers build recognition through repetition, and that only works if you commit to a single term and hold it.
Challenge Existing Categories When the Market Has Outgrown Them
Sean acknowledged upfront that category creation carries real costs. “I would love for that not to be the reality because it sounds way easier to just drop into an existing category,” he said, framing the decision as a conclusion he reached reluctantly rather than a positioning preference. The existing options simply didn’t fit. “The existing categories simply aren’t advanced enough. They don’t exhibit the same behaviors.” That gap led him to a direct conclusion: “There is a fundamental need for a new category here.” When existing categories fail to describe the problem buyers are experiencing, trying to squeeze into one of them creates more confusion than clarity.