Category leaders don’t just compete—they define the game. Here’s how to frame, name, and claim your own category before AI—or a smarter competitor—does it for you.
Key Takeaways
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Category leaders win outsized market share, talent, and mindshare.
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Don’t compete—reframe the problem and redefine the category.
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Name the outcome, not the product. Language shapes perception.
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Claim your category with a lightning-strike moment, not a slow burn.
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AI is reshaping industries—create your category before it creates you.
Are you the leader of your category?
It’s an important question—because growth isn’t a fair fight.
All sorts of unfair advantages go to the category leader.
- You find it easier to recruit A-players.
- You find it easier to raise money.
- You find it easier to get press and word of mouth.
You become the default—the safe bet. And the majority of industry profit goes to the leader.
That’s why category design has become so popular among CEOs, especially as they start to scale.
If you can’t become #1 in your category, you might need to create a new category where you can be.
Playing Bigger
There’s a great book on this topic called Play Bigger, by Al Ramadan,, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney.
It’s packed with insight, but it’s also a long read.
Having read it a few times, here’s how I’d break down its core ideas into three simple steps you can use to design:
Step 1. Frame the Problem
The first step in category creation is to reject the premise of the existing category.
You’re not just offering an alternative product… you’re pointing out a flaw in how the category itself is defined.
You need to identify a problem that’s inherent to the current category and express it in a way your customer can say:
“You’re right… that’s not actually what I want anymore.”
When Marketo launched its email marketing product, the leader in the mailing list category was Mailchimp.
If Marketo had positioned itself as a better Mailchimp, most customers would have shrugged and said: “Well, Mailchimp is the leader, so I’ll go with them.”
But Marketo attacked the whole category.
Email marketing software lets you email a list, but it requires continuous effort. Every week, you have to write and send a new newsletter. It’s expensive and wasteful.
Marketo said: the ideal solution isn’t a better mailing list. It’s better triggers.
They wanted their category—Marketing Automation—to be seen as fundamentally different.
They rejected the premise that manually sending newsletters was the best solution—and reframed the problem around automating personalised responses based on customer actions.
Done right, rejecting the premise starts to open your customer’s mind so they start to question their assumptions.
Ideally, you reach the point where you can say:
“If [existing category benefit] is what you want, go for it. But if you know it’s not, there’s something better.”
Key Questions for Founders:
- What assumptions is your category built on that your customers are beginning to question?
- How can you frame the problem in a way that challenges the premise of the existing category?
Step 2. Name the New Category
Now that you’ve framed the problem, you need to give your new approach a name.
Not all names are equal. The right name should emphasise the highest possible value of solving the problem you framed.
Don’t describe what your product does—name the outcome it enables.
One of my favourite examples is from a QA software company.
Most people see QA as a boring, unimportant final step in the dev process—something you have to do, not something that creates value.
So instead of calling their category “QA Automation,” they called it “Business Technology Optimisation.”
Suddenly, it’s not about catching bugs—it’s about optimising business performance through technology.
It elevated the value of QA and gave QA leaders a seat at the table. After all, QA is the difference between achieving business value or destroying it.
But defining a category name isn’t enough.
Category creators go one step further: they create unique names for the features a product needs to have to enter the category.
This practice is called “languaging”—a term that is, itself, a perfect example of inventing language to support a new category.
Take one of the hottest new categories: Foundational Models—think OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. They’ve popularised a whole new vocabulary:
- LLMs
- Temperature
- Prompt Engineering
- Model Hallucination
- Context Window
Unique names for a new category. It creates a system of concepts that makes it more distinctive and memorable.
Key Questions for Founders:
- What is the boldest, most valuable outcome you can associate with solving the problem?
- What name would elevate your solution above the perceived value of the current category?
Step 3. Claim the New Category
Framed the problem? Named the new category? Good. Now it’s time to claim it.
Think of this as a coordinated lightning strike.
The idea: it’s better to be very famous for three days than kind-of-known for a year.
You want as many people in your niche as possible talking about your insight at the same time.
To do this, you need a strong manifesto—something that speaks to the frustration people feel with the current category, and the promise of the new one.
Then, share it everywhere:
- Speak at events
- Get invited onto industry podcasts
- Publish on social media
- Get quoted in the press
- Evangelise your early believers
During the lightning strike, prepare concrete stories… examples where the existing category failed, and where your product has surprised its early users.
It’s stories with stakes that will educate and convince—not just facts and figures.
These stories create emotional contrast between the old world and the new one, and help people see themselves in your category.
Key Questions for Founders:
- What message could spread like wildfire and position you as the leader?
- How can you engineer a high-impact moment that sparks category-wide attention?
AI may force your hand
You’ve built credibility in your category. But what if that category is about to collapse?
AI isn’t just creating new categories—it’s making the old ones look old-fashioned.
If you don’t frame, name, and claim the new category, someone else will. And they’ll take the market with them.
There’s only one founder who gets remembered. Make it you.
Bonus: How I use category creation to position my coaching
In coaching circles, leadership is treated as a single category.
Most “CEO coaches” use the same methods for CEOs, co-founders, and senior leaders—assuming one-size-fits-all.
But speak to top founders, and they’ll tell you: classic leadership advice failed them.
Hiring great people and “getting out of the way” didn’t build a beautiful Lego castle—it built a Lego mess.
That’s the reframe: Founder Leadership is its own category.
It requires different principles, different practices, and a different kind of coaching.
That’s what I do—I coach founding CEOs to master the unique skills of scaling as a founder, not just as a CEO.
The role is unlike any other, and it leads to familiar pain points:
“I have no time.”
“My team isn’t aligned around a simple strategy.”
“Is underperformance my fault—or theirs?”
Conventional coaching—sold as sessions—often focuses on emotions over execution.
That’s why I built an ecosystem to accelerate learning and applying Founder Leadership.
Masterminds, hot seats, game plans, clarity calls, intensives, power ups, pathways—each play an essential to driving results on a busy schedule.
It’s not for every CEO. Some prefer a more therapeutic approach. After all, if you feel better, what’s the problem?
But for founder CEOs serious about levelling up, a system beats a sounding board—every time.
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Originally published on 04, Jun 2025.
