Inside AppDome’s Category Creation Strategy: Building a New Market in Mobile Security
Conventional wisdom in venture capital suggests avoiding undefined market categories. Yet in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, AppDome co-creator Tom Tovar revealed how ignoring this advice led to creating a new category in mobile security – and why that decision proved crucial to their success.
Identifying the Category Gap
The mobile security landscape had plenty of tools but lacked automation. As Tom explains, “The threats that we face today inside of a mobile experience have really outstretched the consumer’s ability to protect themselves.” This responsibility shifted to app publishers and developers, but they faced significant challenges: “They don’t have resources, they don’t have the skills to match what the hackers and attackers are doing.”
Creating vs. Joining a Category
While many advised against creating a new category, Tom took a contrarian view: “There used to be this thing in venture capital land that would say, well, if you don’t have a category, then you’re in a bad spot. I disagree. I really disagree. I think you’ve got to be creating new categories.”
This wasn’t about being different for difference’s sake. As Tom notes, “If you look at kind of the way dev teams work, DevOps is all about automating everything… our instinct was, well, why can’t you create the same platform for the cyber initiative inside that pipeline?”
Building Category Leadership
AppDome’s approach to category leadership centered on three key elements:
- Unique Technology Architecture “Have something unique about your architecture, something unique about your technology that will give you staying power,” Tom emphasizes. The hard part wasn’t conceiving the category but “building it. Incredibly difficult.”
- Clear Value Proposition They positioned themselves as solving multiple challenges: “We’re solving time to market, we’re solving ease of resources, improved delivery, consistency, and we’re doing it in a dev way.”
- Customer-Centric Evolution “Listen to our customers at this point. Just listen to our customers, listen to our prospects. Listen to the people that are using the product who want more out of it,” Tom advises.
Scaling Within the Category
As the category creator, AppDome had to define what success looked like. They evolved their metrics alongside their growth: “We used to count the number of customers, and then once we got to a certain number of customers, we’re like, yeah, but our customers have more than one app, so we should count the number of apps.”
This evolution continued: “So we started counting the number of apps and then that got to the tens of thousands of apps, and then we’re like, yeah, but those applications have all these users.”
The Future of the Category
Rather than resting on their category leadership, AppDome continues to expand their vision. The company has launched “a new program where we are partnering with pen testing companies around the world to kind of improve the state of the art of mobile app defense around the world.”
For founders considering category creation, Tom emphasizes the importance of having a noble purpose: “Have something that your brother or sister, mother, grandmother, grandfather, whatever, can get behind.” For AppDome, this means being “on a mission to protect every mobile application in the world.”
The lesson for B2B founders? Sometimes the biggest opportunity lies not in joining an existing category but in creating a new one – provided you have the technology architecture and customer focus to back it up. As Tom puts it, “Find the people who have that in your heart, have that in every layer of your company… and go ride the wave.”
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