"Is category creation still a viable GTM strategy — or has it become too expensive for most companies?"

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now, the thing I keep coming back to is whether we're spending to educate the market or spending to capture demand that already exists. Those are very different bets, and the board wants to see pipeline. Category creation is a long game — you're essentially subsidizing the entire industry's learning curve before you see returns — and the pressure I'm under doesn't really accommodate that timeline. We're in retail, so there's some established vocabulary customers already use. The question is whether we try to reframe that vocabulary and own a new space, or just compete harder in the existing one. I lean toward the latter right now, mostly because the economics of creating net-new mental real estate feel harder to justify when I'm also being asked to show what's driving the bottom 20% of our pipeline.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

For us, the core question is whether category creation actually builds durable demand or whether you're essentially funding market education that your competitors end up harvesting. That's what keeps me up at night when I'm looking at board presentations. In retail, we're already operating in a pretty defined category landscape, so when I look at whether to invest in creating a new frame around something — say, "unified commerce experience" or whatever the current language is — I have to weigh that against more direct demand capture where I know the ROI story is cleaner. The CFO and CEO are looking at the business holistically, not at my awareness metrics, and that creates real tension. So the question I need answered is basically: at what scale and budget level does category creation actually pencil out, and what does the timeline look like before it shows up in numbers that matter to the board?

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

For us, "good" means owning a clear position in the market that customers can actually articulate back to you — not just awareness, but genuine category affinity. And then tying that to business outcomes the board actually cares about: retention, NPS trajectory, pipeline quality. Not just top-of-funnel impressions. How far are we from that? Closer on the retention and NPS side than on the category ownership side. We've done the work to understand our ICP pretty well, we have feedback loops with sales and support, but where I feel the gap is in whether we've truly defined the space we want to own versus just competing in a space someone else defined. That's the harder strategic question, and honestly it's the one that gets crowded out by quarterly execution pressure.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

If I saw a mid-market company — not a Salesforce, not a company with a nine-figure war chest — actually pull off category creation and come out with durable revenue and margin to show for it, not just share of voice, that would make me reconsider. Right now most of the examples I can point to are either well-funded outliers or companies that declared victory too early before the category consolidated around someone else. The other thing that would shift me is better measurement. A lot of the category creation pitch relies on brand and awareness metrics that my CFO and CEO simply don't weight the same way I do when I'm building the case internally. If there were cleaner ways to connect that early category investment to pipeline and retention over a defined time horizon, the conversation with the board would be different. Right now it's a hard sell when I can't show the mechanism.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

The board conversation around NPS and brand investment. Everyone wants to talk about whether category creation works in the abstract, but nobody asks how you actually defend that spend internally when your NPS is flat and your CFO is looking at every line item. For us, the harder problem isn't deciding whether to create a category — it's justifying the long-cycle brand investment to stakeholders who are trained to look at pipeline attribution and bottom-of-funnel numbers. The metrics don't tell that story cleanly, and that gap causes real problems when you're trying to sustain a multi-year category effort.

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now the main thing I'm wrestling with is whether we're actually building a category or just spending money on education that benefits the whole market, including competitors. We're in a space where the problem we solve is real but not widely recognized yet, and there's a constant internal debate about how much of our budget should go toward expanding the pie versus just capturing demand that already exists. The honest tension is that category creation content and campaigns are hard to tie to pipeline in any clean way. I'm held accountable to pipeline and ARR, so when I'm putting budget into thought leadership or market education, I need a story for why that's worth it — and right now that story is harder to tell than it was a year ago given how much scrutiny budgets are under.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

For us, the core question is whether category creation actually generates pipeline at a cost we can defend, or whether it's become a strategy that mostly benefits the companies selling category creation consulting and the analysts writing about it. At a Series B, I'm accountable to pipeline value. So before we'd commit to something like category creation, I'd need to understand the attribution story — how do you tie thought leadership spend and category-shaping content back to revenue in a way that holds up to CFO scrutiny? That's the piece I don't think most frameworks answer cleanly.

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

For us, "good" means our category narrative is doing real work in the market — prospects are arriving with a shared understanding of the problem before we ever talk to them, and we're not spending half of every sales call on education. That's the ideal state. Right now we're probably somewhere in the middle. We have a point of view, we're publishing content around it, but I wouldn't say we've achieved the kind of market pull where the category is doing the heavy lifting. We're still driving most of the awareness ourselves through paid and outbound, which means we're not getting the compounding returns you'd hope for from a real category play. The gap is mostly about reach and repetition at scale. We don't have the budget to be everywhere simultaneously the way a well-funded category creator can, so it's slower than I'd like.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

For us, the thing that would probably shift my view most is seeing a credible, replicable example of a mid-market company — not a Salesforce, not a Gainsight with nine figures of runway — actually pulling off category creation without a multi-year, heavy spend commitment. If someone could show me the mechanics of how they did it with a constrained budget and came out with measurable pipeline attribution, that would make me reconsider how broadly applicable the strategy is. Right now most of the case studies I see are retroactive success stories where the company had venture backing, time, and executive patience that most Series B teams don't actually have. The survivorship bias in how this stuff gets written up makes it hard to evaluate honestly.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

That's a fair question. I think the one that doesn't come up enough is: what's the organizational capability required to actually execute category creation, not just the budget? Everyone focuses on spend — analyst relations, content, events, the whole ecosystem play. But in my experience, the harder constraint is whether you have people who can sustain a multi-year narrative without getting pulled into quarter-to-quarter pipeline pressure. At a Series B, your CFO is looking at pipeline contribution every 90 days. Category creation doesn't show up cleanly in those models, and if you can't defend it in a board deck, it dies quietly. So the question I'd want someone to ask is: "Do you actually have the internal alignment and runway to see this through?" — because the companies that bail 18 months in probably shouldn't have started.

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now, the biggest thing I'm wrestling with is whether we're spending money to educate a market that ultimately buys from someone else. We've got a product that doesn't fit neatly into an existing category, and the question our CFO keeps asking is whether we're subsidizing awareness for the whole space rather than driving pipeline for us specifically. That's a real tension when I'm trying to hit a number.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

For me, the core question is whether category creation actually moves pipe fast enough to justify the investment. I'm sitting on a quota every quarter, and if a GTM bet is going to take 18-24 months to educate the market before we see real deals close, that's a problem I have to solve for my reps in the meantime. The ROI timeline on category creation is just really hard to align with how most sales orgs are measured.

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

For us, "good" is when the market already understands the problem and my reps can walk in and have a conversation about solution fit instead of spending the first 30 minutes explaining why this category of thing should even exist. That's where pipeline velocity actually looks healthy. How far are we from that? Depends on the segment. In our mid-market motion, we're pretty close — buyers are educated, they're already shopping. In some of the newer verticals we're pushing into, we're still doing a lot of that early market education work, which slows everything down and my reps hate it because it doesn't show up cleanly in their quota attainment numbers.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

If I saw consistent, repeatable evidence that a category creation play actually compressed sales cycles instead of extending them, that would make me rethink things pretty quickly. Right now, in my experience, when you're trying to educate the market on a new category, you're adding steps to an already long enterprise sales motion — and that kills quota attainment. Show me a company that did it and hit their numbers *faster*, not just built brand equity over five years, and I'd pay attention. That's the data point I don't see very often.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

That's a fair question. The one I don't hear enough is: what happens to your sales team's morale and retention when a category creation bet doesn't pay off on the timeline leadership promised? Because when we're in market-education mode for 18 months and pipeline is thin, my reps aren't getting paid. Comp plans don't have a "we're building a category" clause. So my best people start looking around, and I'm trying to hold a team together while the company figures out if the bet was right. That cost doesn't show up in anyone's category creation ROI model, but it's very real to me.

Tell me what's top of mind for you on this topic right now — what are you wrestling with?

Right now, the thing I keep coming back to is whether any of this category creation investment actually shows up in the numbers in a reasonable timeframe. We're a manufacturing company — our planning cycles are long, our margins are tight, and when someone comes to me asking for budget to "educate the market" or "define a new space," I need to understand what I'm buying. And usually I can't get a straight answer. The other piece is headcount. Creating a category isn't just a marketing spend line — it's people, it's sustained effort over multiple years, and I'm not sure most mid-market companies have the organizational bandwidth to do that credibly. We're not Salesforce. We don't have the runway to spend three years telling the market what problem they have.

What's the most important thing you need to understand or solve here?

For us, the core question is whether the spend justifies the outcome. Category creation as a GTM strategy is asking a company to essentially educate an entire market before they can sell to it — and that's a real budget commitment before you see a dollar back. In manufacturing, we think about TCO on almost every significant decision. If I'm evaluating a vendor who's pitching themselves as a new category, I need to understand: what's the baseline I'm benchmarking against, and how long before this investment breaks even? If the category doesn't exist yet, there's no benchmark. That's uncomfortable from where I sit. The piece I'd want to understand better is who actually bears the cost of that market education — and whether mid-market companies can realistically sustain it or whether this is really a strategy for companies with a lot more runway than we have.

What does 'good' look like to you — and how far are you from that today?

For us, "good" means every major spend category has a documented strategy tied to a TCO view — not just unit price, but lead time risk, supplier concentration, impact on uptime. We're a manufacturer, so a supplier failure doesn't just affect procurement, it affects the whole production floor. Where we are today? Probably 60% of the way there. We've got decent coverage on our top-spend suppliers, contracts are mostly in place, and we do some benchmarking. But the category plans themselves are inconsistent — some are rigorous, some are basically a spreadsheet someone built three years ago and hasn't touched since. The internal stakeholder alignment piece is also weaker than I'd like. Procurement brings a strategy, and the business unit has already half-committed to a vendor before anyone loops us in.

What would change your perspective on this entirely?

If I saw consistent, credible case studies from companies in our size range — not unicorn SaaS outliers — showing that category creation actually delivered measurable returns within a reasonable horizon, that would move the needle for me. We're talking mid-market manufacturing, where spend discipline and headcount justification are constant pressures. Right now most of what I see is either VC-backed companies burning cash on it or retrospective stories where someone claims credit after the market happened to move their way. Show me the benchmarks, show me the TCO of the whole effort, and I'll take a harder look.

What question are you not being asked that you wish someone would ask?

That's a fair question. I think the one nobody really pushes on is: what's the opportunity cost of the internal resources you're pulling into a category creation effort? When vendors pitch category creation, they talk about market education spend, analyst relations, all that. But in my world, the real cost is the finance and ops headcount that gets pulled into supporting a story that isn't generating revenue yet. Those people have day jobs. In manufacturing, if your FP&A folks are building models to justify a category that doesn't exist yet, that's time not spent on TCO analysis or supplier benchmarking that actually moves the needle this quarter. Nobody asks me "what did you stop doing to fund this?" And that's usually where the real cost is buried.