Large companies often focus R&D on high-ticket items, neglecting smaller accessory categories. This creates a market gap for focused startups to innovate and solve specific problems that bigger players overlook, allowing them to build a defensible niche.

When creating a new category like Drift's "conversational marketing," no search volume exists for the new term. Marketers must capture demand from high-volume, existing terms (e.g., "live chat") and use that traffic to educate the audience on the new category's unique value.

Instead of viewing niching as restricting business, adopt the "FOCUS" mindset: Fix One Clearly Urgent Struggle. This forces you to solve a high-value problem for a specific audience, which positions you as a category of one, much like the water brand Liquid Death.

For Numi's novel undershirts, a major challenge was educating the market on the problem and solution. When competitors emerged, they didn't just steal market share; they helped validate the category and shoulder the burden of customer education, ultimately expanding the total addressable market.

The backlash against 'category creation' isn't about the concept itself, but its poor execution. Critics react negatively when marketers simply apply a new name to a product in an existing category without any fundamental product differentiation. This is seen as disingenuous marketing spin rather than true innovation.

A "takeaway sale" replaces an existing competitor (their toilet paper vs. yours), while a "demand gen sale" introduces a new category (a bidet). This distinction is critical because in takeaway sales, prospects already have a solution, so a pitch about your product's features is not inherently valuable.

To sell into a cynical market where previous solutions failed (a "Third Journey"), you can't just be a "next-gen" tool. You must re-educate buyers with precise messaging and a new category name, then instantly prove you're different by delivering undeniable value with minimal effort.

The founder of StatusGator calls inventing the 'status page aggregator' category a mistake. While it eventually provided a first-mover advantage, it meant years of slow growth because no one was searching for the solution, highlighting the difficulty of educating a market.

Many 'category creation' efforts fail because they just rename an existing solution. True category creation happens when customers perceive the product as fundamentally different from all alternatives, even without an official name for it. The customer's mental bucketing is the only one that matters.