Part 1 dealt with one thing first: category design is not a naming game, and it is not a grand branding wager every startup should force. At its core, it is about correcting a market that is using the wrong lens to understand you.
That leads to the harder and more practical question:
If category design is not just a slogan, how do founders actually do it?
I do not want to turn this into a smug seven-step template. Real category work does not emerge from filling in boxes. Still, once I put together the first draft, your transcript, and the additional research, the method seems to compress into six moves. They are not tidy stages so much as six layers you usually have to revisit.
1. Decide which question you are rewriting before you decide how to describe the product
This is where many teams go wrong.
They start with:
- what is our sharpest feature
- what should the homepage headline say
- what makes us look newer than the competition
- should we coin a new term
All of that comes too late.
The earlier questions are:
- how does the market currently understand this issue
- why is that understanding starting to fail
- which hidden cost is being ignored
- if we rewrote the question, what would the new one be
That is one of the strongest lines in Lochhead’s transcript: name, frame, and claim the problem. Do not begin with “market your solution”. Begin by making the market recognise that the old problem definition is no longer sufficient.
Salesforce fits neatly here.
What made Salesforce powerful was not merely that it put CRM on the internet. It rewrote the question from “how do we buy a feature-rich CRM package” to “why are businesses still accepting the cost, friction, upgrades, maintenance, and lock-in of traditional enterprise software?” That is why “No Software” had force. It did not deny that software existed. It reframed the burden the buyer was carrying.
So the first move in category design is not introducing the product.
It is exposing the inadequacy of the old question.
A practical check
If the only way you can currently describe your company is:
- a faster X
- a cheaper Y
- an AI-powered Z
then you are probably still trapped inside the old question.
2. Write a point of view with real friction, not a polite line everyone can agree with
A surprising number of founders think they have a point of view when what they really have is a sentence no one would object to.
For example:
- the future of work is becoming more automated
- marketing is changing
- AI is reshaping industries
- consumers care more about experience
None of those is a category POV.
They are too close to weather reports. No one changes budget, evaluation criteria, or buying logic because of them.
A good POV needs at least three things.
First, it identifies where the old world is already failing.
Not a vague macro trend, but a real cost, friction, or blind spot people are still living with.
Second, it changes the causal story the buyer is using.
Not “we are better”, but “you think the issue is A, but what is actually constraining you is B”.
Third, it should create some productive discomfort.
If your POV never makes anyone pause, frown, or reconsider a familiar assumption, it is usually too weak.
Airbnb’s “Live There” is useful not because it is pretty copy, but because it reframed travel from “finding accommodation” to escaping standardised tourism and entering local life. Airbnb’s own 2016 announcement says as much. The campaign was framed as a response to dissatisfaction with mass-produced travel, not merely as a push for more listings. That is what a POV does. It does not just describe the product. It renames the problem.
Otis belongs here as well. Elisha Otis did not simply unveil a safety elevator. He staged a public demonstration that fixed the market’s attention on safety and reframed vertical movement as trustworthy infrastructure. That is what a POV does at its best. It does not begin with specifications. It begins by forcing the market to see the neglected problem.
What is not a POV?
- we have lots of features
- we use AI to help you
- we are an all-in-one platform
- we care about customer success
Those are closer to self-description than to a category point of view.
3. Use language to draw a new boundary, but do not invent language for vanity’s sake
Lochhead talks constantly about languaging. Taken too far, it becomes cultish. Used properly, it is very useful: new language is not there to sound clever; it is there to draw a boundary.
If you want the market to adopt a new lens, old language often drags too much old baggage with it: old comparison grids, old budgets, old buying logic, old expectations.
That is why:
- Microsoft did not simply place Word, Excel, and PowerPoint beside one another, but named the combination an Office suite, a productivity suite
- HubSpot did not merely sell marketing tools, but pushed inbound marketing as a whole method
- SPANX refused to stay inside the language of girdles and control-top hosiery, and leaned into shapewear
- OpenAI, had it positioned ChatGPT merely as “better search”, would have been far easier to push back into an old drawer
But this needs care. Not every invented phrase counts as category language. Some are just internal jargon founders desperately want the market to admire.
What makes language more likely to stick?
1. It catches the buyer’s problem, not just the company’s technology.
“No Software” captures burden, not architecture.
“Inbound Marketing” captures a shift in method, not merely a tool category.
2. It slices against the weakness of the old category.
“Shapewear” had more force than “girdle” because it moved the category out of repair, embarrassment, and control into a more aspirational frame.
3. It can be repeated and adopted by others.
If your new language only lives in the founder’s keynote and nowhere else, it is not yet category language. It has to travel into product, sales, investor conversations, customer vocabulary, and internal decision-making.
SPANX and Starbucks are both useful here. SPANX did not merely choose a nicer label than “girdle”; it shifted the category away from embarrassment, correction, and concealment towards chosen shape and visible outcome. Starbucks did not simply sell more expensive coffee; it reframed a commodity into a different language of consumption and experience. That is why Lochhead’s line, once stripped of the stage theatrics, is still useful: different, not better. This does not mean “better” is irrelevant. It means that in category work, the market must first feel that the boundary has moved, not just that the score improved slightly.
A useful warning
A lot of AI companies now default to words such as copilot, assistant, and agent. Sometimes those terms help. Sometimes they quietly reduce the product to an add-on. So the question is not whether the language sounds new. The question is what boundary it actually creates.
4. Do not just teach the market that your thing exists; teach the market how to evaluate it
This is one of the most important points, and one of the easiest places to fail.
Quite a few teams do a reasonable job of market education. They teach buyers that:
- there is a new problem
- the old way is increasingly inadequate
- there is a new sort of solution
And then the value leaks out to someone else, because the company never defined the new evaluation criteria as part of the category.
The great risk in category design is not merely being ignored.
It is being understood and then commoditised under generic standards.
Microsoft Office is useful again here. Microsoft did not simply say “here are several tools”. It reframed them as a productivity suite, which also changed the evaluation criteria: integration, one user experience, data moving across applications, and total cost. Comparison no longer rested on whether an individual word processor or spreadsheet was marginally better in isolation.
For founders, this is very practical. Ask yourself:
- which three criteria do I want buyers to use when they evaluate us
- which old criteria hurt us, but are already outdated
- which new criteria make us look like the natural answer
If you do not design those criteria, the market will.
And the market usually takes the path of least effort. It reaches for the old spreadsheet.
5. Put the category story into the website, product, sales, and content, not just inside the founder’s head
This is why I do not like treating category design as a pure marketing topic.
If your category story exists only in a pitch to investors, or in a manifesto on the company blog, it has not yet become part of the company’s operating system.
At minimum, four things need to line up.
Website
The opening message should not hurry into a feature list. It should explain what has broken in the world, why the old answer is no longer enough, and what new choice you represent.
Product positioning
This is where category narrative becomes positioning. You are not merely answering “what product are we?”. You are answering “what new logic of choice do we belong to?”. If the positioning collapses back into feature description, the category story usually breaks somewhere between the homepage and the demo.
Product
If your category story claims a new way of working, but the product behaves exactly like the old tools it claims to transcend, the story collapses quickly.
Sales
A sales deck should not simply walk through features. It should first open up the buyer’s old frame and then lead towards the product. Without that, the category story becomes two pages of rhetoric followed by a standard demo.
Content and market education
Content should not merely praise the company. It should keep deepening the problem, sharpening the language, and training the market to see through your lens.
HubSpot is a strong example. Inbound marketing did not live only on a product page. It lived in blog content, educational materials, certification, and the wider commercial motion. That is category work.
5.5. Common failure modes
It is worth pulling the common failure modes into one place, because category design often fails not through bad theory, but through half-finished execution.
- New language without a new problem. The market reads it as packaging.
- The founder can say it, but sales and product cannot carry it. The story sounds ambitious, the experience feels old.
- You educate the market, but never define the new evaluation criteria. You open the market and someone else captures the value.
- You present category design as “we have no competition”. Buyers and investors usually hear that as evasion.
- It is really a better product, but you insist on calling it a new category. That is one of the fastest ways to lose credibility.
6. In fundraising, do not present category design as “we have no competitors”
This sentence could probably be printed as a sticker and placed on a great many pitch decks.
Founders often distort category creation into:
- we have no competitors
- we are a brand new category
- the market is therefore enormous
- you should therefore invest
That framing usually makes experienced people roll their eyes, because it sounds like an attempt to avoid comparison rather than rewrite the problem.
The better story is not “there is no competition”. It is:
- what methods people use today to address the old version of the problem
- why those methods are increasingly inadequate in a new context
- why you are not merely adding features, but rewriting the problem and the criteria
- why, if the market accepts this new frame, you are unusually well placed to own it
Here I actually agree with one of the hard edges in the transcript: if founders do not take responsibility for how the market understands them, the market will force them back into an old bucket. That is especially visible in fundraising. Investors do need frameworks. But you do not want to outsource the entire framing job to them.
What a strong fundraising category narrative sounds like
Not:
- we are the AI version of X
- we are an all-in-one platform
- the market is huge, and 1% would already be enough
More like:
- here is why the old problem has worsened under new conditions
- here is why the existing category solves only the surface
- here is why this is the right moment for a new category to form
- here is why we, rather than someone else, are especially credible as the category owner
Final thought: category design is not about making the story bigger, but about making the value legible in the right way
If I had to close Part 2 in one sentence, it would be this:
Category design is not about making the product sound bigger. It is about rewriting the market’s question until your real value becomes visible.
So it is not just a copywriting trick, and it is not a naming workshop.
It is closer to founders participating directly in the design of the market itself.
What you are doing is not:
- finding a flashy label
- putting a futuristic line on the homepage
- telling investors you have no competition
What you are doing is:
- exposing the old question
- writing a point of view with friction
- using language to draw a new boundary
- changing the evaluation criteria
- embedding that narrative into product, website, sales, and fundraising
That is how category design stops being “a big story” and starts becoming a founder capability.