Marketers often mistake strategic positioning (finding a niche) for true category creation. A new category introduces a solution to a problem customers haven't yet articulated, requiring education on why they need a thing they've never bought before.

To fight commoditization against Zoom, Livestorm didn't compete on features. Instead, they hyper-niched their positioning to serve "enterprise marketers in Europe," focusing on specific industries like banking and pharma. This created a clear, defensible go-to-market strategy that avoided direct feature-to-feature comparisons with the market leader.

A coffee brand struggling to compete with other roasters was advised to reposition itself within the multi-billion dollar wedding gift industry. By targeting a different use case and customer (bridal registries), the commoditized product gains a unique and defensible niche.

Bootstrappers lack the capital and time to establish a new market category. A better strategy is to anchor your product in a known category (e.g., "site audit tool") and then use your unique features (e.g., "that also fixes the issues") as a key differentiator.

Obsessing over creating a new market category is often a mistake. Data shows the vast majority of successful public tech companies compete within established categories. It's more effective to get "invited to the party" by using a known category label and then winning with a sharp, differentiated value proposition.

Truly creating a new category is rare. A more effective strategy is creating a sub-category by anchoring your product to an understood concept, framing it as 'like X, but different in a key way.' For example, Drift was 'live chat, but for sales,' not an entirely new concept.

Most companies claiming to create new categories are actually creating sub-categories. They anchor their concept to something familiar, like Drift positioning as "live chat, but for sales" or the first cars being called "horseless carriages." This is more realistic as it doesn't require educating the market from zero.

Instead of inventing a completely new market, position your product as a sub-category of something people already understand (e.g., "like live chat, but for sales"). This "horseless carriage" approach makes innovation digestible by grounding it in a familiar concept, as Drift did.

When customers already use a similar product, don't just claim to be "better," as this keeps you in the same mental bucket. Instead, create a new sub-category (e.g., "legacy humidifiers" vs. "next-gen"). This forces the buyer to re-evaluate their needs against a new standard you define, separating you from the competition.