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From Customer Pain to Category Creation: Inside Monte Carlo’s Unconventional Go-to-Market Journey

The best category creation stories often start not with a marketing plan, but with a problem that keeps surfacing in conversation after conversation. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses revealed how the company built the data observability category by obsessively focusing on customer problems rather than traditional category creation playbooks.

Starting with the Problem, Not the Solution

Before Monte Carlo had a product, a website, or even a name for their category, they had validation of a persistent problem. As Barr tested different startup ideas, she discovered that one specific pain point resonated deeply with potential customers. “The idea of, hey, the data is wrong, what can I do about this? Or why am I always the last person to hear about this? Why am I hearing from downstream consumers that the data is wrong?” These questions consistently struck a nerve in her conversations.

The validation wasn’t just about the current state of the problem – it was about its trajectory. “It became clear that it’s going to be a problem that’s going to be worse over time because people are going to be using data, more data is going to become more critical to companies operations, more critical to companies products,” Barr explains.

The Non-Traditional Path to Category Creation

While many startups rush to build their brand and establish category leadership through marketing, Monte Carlo took an unusually patient approach. “We actually took us a long time to get our first website,” Barr reveals. “I think it was maybe a couple of years into the company’s existence. We already had the product, we had customers, we had the full thing where we didn’t have a website.”

This wasn’t oversight – it was strategy. “I really believe in kind of being extreme in our focus,” Barr explains. “The only thing that matters at Monte Carlo now and forever is getting as many customers as possible and making customers as happy as possible. And every single person at Monte Carlo should be working towards one of those two goals.”

Learning the Language of the Category

Perhaps most telling about Monte Carlo’s approach to category creation was how they arrived at the term “data observability” itself. Rather than crafting the perfect term in a boardroom, they listened to how customers described their challenges.

“In the early days, I actually had a couple of people who told me, that is such a terrible word… But then listening to customers, they just kept repeating those words and they just kept using those words, and they started writing blogs using data observability,” Barr recalls. “So really it was not up to me, if you will. I just had to admit the reality, which is this is what the market and customers are telling us.”

Making Customer-Centricity Real

Many companies claim to be customer-centric, but Monte Carlo built specific mechanisms to ensure this wasn’t just a platitude. “When we hire people, both folks in management positions or not, we try to understand what motivates them. And if we understand that you care about making an impact by your customers, that is what we look for… we screen for that pretty aggressively,” Barr explains.

This focus extends beyond hiring. Barr personally maintains a heavy schedule of customer interaction: “I probably do between one and three speaking opportunities per week for the last three and a half years or so since we started Monte Carlo.” These aren’t just promotional opportunities – they’re chances to deeply understand customer challenges and thinking.

The All-Company Approach to Category Building

Unlike traditional approaches that delegate category creation to marketing, Monte Carlo made it everyone’s responsibility. “This is 100% a company wide thing,” Barr emphasizes. Each department plays a unique role: “Our product team is basically building a product that’s completely innovative. There isn’t anything like this that they can look to… Our marketing team is responsible for spreading or speaking with customers or getting the building the awareness around the fact that there is a solution for this problem.”

For founders embarking on category creation, Monte Carlo’s journey offers a powerful alternative to conventional wisdom. Rather than starting with messaging and marketing, they started with deep customer understanding. Rather than rushing to define their category, they let customer language guide them. And rather than treating category creation as a marketing exercise, they made it central to every function of the company.

The result? A category that emerged organically from customer needs rather than being forced into existence through marketing spend – and a company positioned to lead it authentically because they helped customers define it in the first place.