B2B Category Design & Positioning: 8 Questions to Find the Right Frame

So I think the simple way to put this is everything is a category. Your brain shops in categories. I'm gonna take 5 minutes and kind of talk about what that means, 'cause category is like another marketing sort of buzzword, but your brain shops in categories and B2B buyers also shop in categories. And it really, what it means is when people think of your product first, you're in consideration set, when they compare other products to your product, you're the category leader. That's really it. So for this presentation, I've got tons and tons of examples, about 20 of them. I've got lots of questions that we're going to kind of shape the question over and over again. So I put those questions in the chat. What changed? Who feels the shift? What's the ambition of the buyer? What's the real enemy here? And then what's that enemy costing them? And then finally, the sort of the capstone of it all is what's your special sauce and what category do you own? What do you call this? So let's get started. Everything's a category. Name your category before a competitor does. And this is important for buyers and for AI because both of them will remember who got there first. So nobody really buys products. Everybody buys categories. You either create your own or you live inside someone else's. So let's look at some examples of what that looks like. Liquid Death shot up out of nowhere. It's just water, but if you think about water, there's all sorts of kinds of water. There's pH-balanced, there's vitamin water, there's bubbly water. And Everything is something unique within the category, and that's what really we're going for here today. And this has been a B2C concept for a long time, but now as the shelf on B2B grows larger and larger, we've all seen that martech slide where it's gone from thousands to tens of thousands of options for martech and technology purchases. You need to be able to stand out and say, what's your unique secret sauce? Music, you stopped buying albums when streaming became a category. All types of music are categories, hip-hop, pop, Latin. So what's your flavor is really what we're trying to get to, or what do you believe in? That's another way to put it. So my dad believes in Marriott. He loves the sameness of Marriott hotels. It's a plus for him. It's not a plus for me. I'm more of an Airbnb guy. And Airbnb created a category by not creating any hotels, but by creating experiences. Category design isn't branding either. Branding sits inside of it. So I would put it this way. Category design is the larger frame that buyers use to talk about their problems. And their problems are way more interesting than your product. So I'll say that again. Their problems are more interesting to them than your product will ever be. So that's the first touchpoint. Like, why am I going to give you money if I don't have a problem that you can solve? So that's thing one. And category design operates there. Within that is positioning. And that's kind of what we're talking about as well today because it's part and parcel of the category design. And that's where you sit against the competitors. Branding is how you look and how you— I think behavior is the right word for branding. It's how your company behaves, how they dress, what it looks like, what the logo looks like. It's colors and fonts, but it's also the attitude in the copy as well. And then below all that is product marketing, is claims and features. And the problem with claims and features, and I could go on about this for a whole event, is that it makes buyers work too hard. So if you have a claim and they're comparing you to someone else, then it's already sort of game over because they're trying to figure out who's better. And a key concept here that we're going to talk about is trying to not figure out who's better, but who's distinctively different and who does it a new way versus an old way. So when people and AI have this more reliable framework to recommend you and to understand you, then good things start to happen. Your pages convert, AI will cite you more because it understands the problems you're solving and the problems you're solving are reflected in the things people are asking for online. Your go-to-market gets a lot less chaotic. So we're always chasing— Jessica has a tough one. She's got a multi-sided market with a ton of history and money against what they're doing. So it becomes, again, more important. If I wanted to start a new water company, people would go, you're crazy. Well, Liquid Death did it and they did it pretty quickly and it's a multimillion-dollar company. Okay, so category design is not branding. What it really is, is if you're a musician, you'll understand this, or if you dance, or if you do any kind of art, you'll kind of understand this, that your brain needs a framework. So like, I recently got back into playing guitar and making music again, which I did in a past life. And it's really great. And I have a horrible memory for almost everything. And I don't have a great memory for remembering songs, but what struck me is that I couldn't sit here and write the words down to a song, but if I played the first note or the intro to that, then I'll be able to sing the whole song without thinking about it. So this is what I'm talking about. You want people to sing your song without thinking about it. And, you know, again, with the song metaphor, Mick Jagger is 80-plus years old and he sings hundreds, if not thousands of songs. And if you think about the last time you bought something in a B2B purchase, you weren't looking at features, you were looking at what the market told you. Maybe it was what AI said, but in general, you know, people are looking for market leaders to help them guide their way forward. And Gartner has plenty of evidence to support this. There's plenty of evidence to support that the earlier you get in, and talk to or connect with people at a category level, the higher the preferences for your solution when it comes to making a decision. So you need to have a bucket to put what you do in, and that bucket needs to speak to the problems that it solves for buyers. And in general, if you're the first one to get in that bucket, you're gonna have a better, easier time. If that bucket is more unique than everybody else's, you're gonna have a better, easier time. And all this is true across B2B and B2C. There's really no difference. And the outcome here, I'm gonna talk a lot about outcomes today, like not products, but outcomes. The outcome is that it makes choosing you easier. That's really it. You wanna make the buyer the hero. You become a guide worth following. And you help them buy without feeling sold by you. And there's plenty of examples. So Oura Ring, my daughter, we just bought her an Oura Ring, has this readiness score. And it turns the sleep tracker into sort of motivation for her to be more active or a user to be more active, which is really unique. Duolingo does the same sort of thing. They have streaks that turn language into a habit loop and not a course. So it isn't just that it feels more personal and unique, it's that they're changing your behavior in a way where you don't think about it. So it's not like I need to take 5 minutes and learn today, it's like I just need to take these 5 minutes, that's all I've— 5 minutes is all I'm giving, I'm not committing to learning anything, if that makes any sense. Gong is a B2B brand, what they do is call recording of meetings, of sales calls, but who needs more recordings of sales calls? It doesn't impact the business in any way, but the intelligence from it does. And they were brilliant about calling this intelligence revenue intelligence. And now instead of this being a sales tool, it's a chief revenue officer must-have, right? And there's another example in that, changing the frame in a way that changes the buyer or makes people higher up the food chain with budget more apt to buy from you, more interested in what you do. Monday.com is another kind of good example of that. It's a little jargony, but they have this concept of the work operating system. But what they did is, just to be blunt, no one really cares how hard life is for A project manager, and they're in these dungeons. Yeah, there you go. Gong started as conversation intelligence. I think either one is really strong, and it's a great, perfect example for what we're doing today. It's not how we record calls or why we record calls. It's intelligence, and you need this intelligence to impact the business and in some way. But anyway, folks don't care about the hard life of a project manager at the C-suite level, but they do care if all of their people are discombobulated and working in different systems and not being productive. Deel is a global payroll company. They just make it feel easy to hire people globally. So that's kind of a, a new category for sure. Drift is one of my favorites. It's Dave Gearhart, our beloved Exit 5 leader, but they started with, I think it was conversational marketing. And the key idea there was you have leads that are filling out forms and they're hot when they're filling out a form, but then you hand that form off to sales and 3 days later, somebody somebody follows up with them. Now that seems old-timey right now, that you'd wait 3 days for someone to follow up, but it wasn't old-timey at the time that they came out with it. So they coined this term conversational marketing, which is really just a way of talking to people when they're interested in you. After the moment's gone, they tend to be less interested. All right, so we'll end this section of what it is and why it's important with a little definition. And if anyone has any questions or pushback to any of this, let me know. But category design is a discipline of framing a buyer's problem so your company is the obvious answer, so your company feels like the right choice. And the questions that I put in here— and I can't see how many people are on the chat or anything like that, but I can see the chat. So the questions I put in here are questions that we're gonna answer for a couple companies. And, you know, hopefully I can answer some of those questions for you. So feel free to sort of jump in here. So the 2 real companies that I'm trying to help do this with right now are InCheck Solutions, and Kirsten's on the line, and I appreciate you being here. I really, really do. And InCheck Solutions is background screening for employers. They want out of commoditized vendor mode and into partner mode. And Kirsten, you know, my role here is not to tear down, like, I don't even think this is really a teardown of anything. It's just to talk about what, you know, the typical thinking is versus what kind of the new thinking should be. And I might get some of your details a little wrong, but I hope I don't offend you in any way. I don't think I will. I think you're good. I think this is all, this is all top-of-the-line stuff, above-the-line stuff. The other companies get SubSol, and, and that's a little bit harder one to understand, but it's health data infrastructure for, for AI search. Um, they're— they have a completely new product, they have a completely new category. Um, and, and where they're working right now is, is a little, uh, product-focused, um, because the product is complicated, and we'll get into it, uh, And they desire to get out of that hamster wheel and into a better place. But it takes time. It takes time. So the first question, and again, I'm gonna pose these questions and if you have your company or something that you're working on, I know there's both brands and agency people here, feel free to push back. Feel free to ask me a question or Ideally, you'll put your answer in here and I can give you some feedback pretty quick. But the first question is, what do customers pay for? It's not how your product works, but what do they walk away with? And it's gotta be just a few words. It's definitely outcome-focused. It is not what you do. It's not how you do it, although how you do it sometimes is at play. But, you know, for instance, it's not our people are better. And, you know, better is another one of those bad words, you know, better this. People don't pay for better this or better that. They, you know, is a luxury item, is a Rolex watch better than another, you know, high-end watch? That's really not the question at hand. The question at hand is is does it speak to you? If you're gonna spend $10,000 for something, it has to have some meaning for you. So what do customers pay for? And, you know, the other thing is don't fall into the jargon land of like AI-powered workflow automation platform and something like that. You guys all know that, but unfortunately we get in a room and not everybody's sort of tuned into the same thing. And it creates outputs that look like that. So Slack really is about fewer internal emails and more discussion. So customers don't pay for another channel-based marketing messaging platform, right? They want more decisions. So Slack sort of sold the death of a behavior that everyone hated, not a chat tool. And I think there's a lesson in that. Stripe, What do people want to do? They just want to— hang on one second. They just want to accept money on the internet. They don't want a payment API for developers, right? So you see the difference here in what you do and what the outcome is. Peloton is a boutique at-home— it's a stationary bike. But really what people are paying for is this at-home experience that feels very high-end. Um, so the first question here is, is what do customers pay for? Um, and, you know, let's look at that with these live examples. Let's start moving a little quicker here. Um, InCheck, uh, fast, accurate background checks, you know, that's viable. Um, but really, a background check is a moment in time. Um, it's a report. And does a business need another report? No, they need what the outcome is from that report. So hiring the best candidates with without slowing down the process and giving us in HR a way to make it defensible is what people pay for. That's where the money goes. For Subsalt, you know, one of the features of what they do and their capability to help researchers is that the data comes sort of pre-approved. For lack of a better word, and just trying to keep it at a simple high level. So with data that's pre-approved, then that means you don't have to submit your research request to a committee and move at people speed. You can move at AI speed or internet speed. So really, customers pay to get their research out of a queue. That's what they want. If the research is sitting there with a committee, it takes weeks. and tens of thousands of dollars, and oftentimes they shrink down the dataset or the ability to use the data in such a way that the research just kind of goes kerplop. But now there's a way to not only deanonymize the data but make it available so a lot of different people in the organization and AI can sort of look at the data in different ways without having to go through the committee. And this is important because health outcomes are important, HIPAA is important, so it's not the rules that are bad, it's what people need is what we're focused on there. So David, frame or category can change quickly, especially in emerging B2B tech, so companies need to monitor and shift with that, is that right? Is that a comment or a question? Looks like a comment to me. Anyway, if you have a question, throw it in there. So the next one— So the question is, in either of the cases you're talking about, are the companies dealing with either a new tech or a new offering that enables what they're doing? Everybody's got AI in some way. So the short answer is yes. The point I guess I'm trying to make here is, and again, if you go back to that concentric circle thing, Is we haven't gotten there yet. We will at the— one of the last questions is your special sauce, right? So that's where we'll bring in what you do, what you do differently. But again, in terms of framing up the category, the majority of what we're talking about and the majority of your homepage, honestly, is going to be about their problems and their world and how this changes things. All right, I hope that answers the, the, the question. I think, you know, everybody's, everybody's got cool technology now, um, uh, so, you know, everybody says they've got good people, um, so, so if you take those things off the table, what do you got? It's, it's empathy, and that's, that's the kind of the one word for all of this. Empathy builds trust. Um, okay, so the next thing that we want to, that we want to kind of the question we want to ask is what changed? So what changed is really about a shift. There's an old way and a new way, right? And something is changing. And, you know, in that last slide, I kind of said there's this megatrend, our world is moving faster, because I noticed as I was doing these, these side by side, they're both sort of time-based. You know, I do need fast, accurate background checks. So I can blah, blah, blah. I do need clinical data in minutes, not months, so I can blah, blah, blah. Speed is important. Time is super important, and it's getting compressed in everything we do. But your job is not to tell people how you're using AI to make, you know, do something better, faster, easier. It's to, in this context, it's to speak with empathy to what it is they're they're trying to solve. So if you think about the shift, think about storytelling, the hero's journey, that kind of thing. There's always an inciting incident. There's always something that happens that sends the hero on their path. And oftentimes the hero is just sort of going along, living their life. Luke Skywalker was just a kid living on a planet. And then all of a sudden, all these people converge on him and he's like, what, what, what? And his world cracks open. And his journey begins. So that's what changed for him. And you'll find in all these categories or in all the markets, there's constant change and it's caused by all sorts of things. But the important thing here is to understand where the instability starts and how it can be used to your advantage. So some of these examples I use are old, but I use them here because because they're just easy for us to get. If I have to explain, like, Subsalt is hard enough to explain in proper detail at 5:00 AM in the morning. So Netflix, you know, broadband reached the living room. So if anyone here is approaching my age, they might remember the old days of going to Blockbuster and renting a movie and then having to go back on Monday and drive and return the movie, or worse, go back on Tuesday and drive and return the movie with late fees. So something changed in the world, and that was broadband brought video and streaming video into our homes. Salesforce, if you remember, everyone talks about no software, that kind of thing. So there they framed up the enemy as the old way, And the new way was, you know, you're going to get everything on your browser. I worked at Adobe during this time, and Adobe, you know, has had at that time 50 different software products, all very expensive. And we launched the Adobe Cloud. And the— and I remember sitting in a meeting going, wait a minute, you're going to charge people a little more money and not send them software? Like, what's going on here? Like, I, I didn't look at that, and a lot of people didn't look at that as an inherent Plus, you know, but now we do. Now it seems silly. Like if we see a disc or we see software that's actually in a box, it feels a little old-timey. And plus I don't even have a place to put a CD or a DVD on my computer. Shopify was the same thing, right? So sure, we can have a dev team build out an e-commerce site for you. That's the old way. And the new way was, no, it's a platform and you don't need any devs to do it. You just need to kind of get your head around building your business. So these are changes in the world. Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small. Sometimes they're things that we just realize that we don't like and want to change. So in our live examples, what changed for buyers that buy, you know, the HR department that buys from InCheck Solutions? Well, background screening used to be this, this report, but now hiring kind of spans more roles, more different types of roles, which means more different types of people to understand. We're working from all over the place, um, and there's new regulatory, uh, regulations coming into play. So if someone works in California, the regulations are different than Texas, etc., etc. So it's no longer a static report that says, hey, you know, Joe's a good guy, check, done. It's pre- and post-hire monitoring. So the needs in that case have changed. And for Subsalt, this one's a little bit easier. You know, it's AI-accelerated research. You know, committees work at human speed. They're slow. They actually kill research and can often hurt the outcomes that these researchers are trying to get, but it's in service of, you know, a good thing. So here what's changing is this human versus AI thing, and that's, you know, that's often happening everywhere. The other thing here is if you've ever heard of category entry points, it's a concept in a book, I think it's called How We Grow, I forget the writer, but How We Grow is a great book. It's a data book. It's one of the best books I've read on marketing. And the approach is basically, if you own the category entry points, you own the category. And how do you own category entry points? It's mental and physical availability. So what we're talking about here doesn't really have a physical component, but it could, but a mental component Meaning, as people are searching, how are you making yourself available? And if you go back to the definition of what it is that I'm talking about here, it is about making it easier for buyers to buy from you. Okay. So I'm going to move a little quicker, I think. Who feels this shift? This one's pretty easy. Who are your buyers? Everybody understands who their buyers are, I think, at some level. I want to point out to you that you can change your buyers. You can swim upstream or downstream. I've swum, gone from trying to sell security software to the CISO in an organization, and they were like, I don't have any problems, leave me alone. And then we tried to sell it to the developers and told them to, you know, gave them, not told them, but gave them a way to show the impact of this software to the, you know, chief security officer or their, you know, the person in charge of security for the organization. And it worked like gangbusters. It worked great. And it was immediate and profound, the difference that the sales teams were having in the conversation. So who feels this shift? I'm going to move quickly on this one, but it's really, there's 2 buyers. I know we love to talk about ABM and we love to— the 15-person buying committee that needs 27 touches before they do anything. There's some truth to that, but it's all also, in my opinion, attribution for attribution's sake. There's 2 emotions that are really happening and the emotions drive decisions. Emotions drive decisions in people and in organizations. So the first one is, who's the economic buyer? Who's on the hook for business results? Who's got to stand up? And either take the win or take the fall if something happens. And then who's on the hook for performance? So who's experiencing frustration and doing and using this? And it's important to know both. They do buy for different reasons. I'm not going to go through these examples. I'm going to just kind of move on, except to say, try to make it as real of a person and real of a problem in your mind as possible. So like, you know, for Datadog, I wrote an engineer paged at 3 AM. You know, that's, that's a pain. That's a pain point. Now, the VP who owns this doesn't really care what's happening. They might, they might, you know, have a little empathy for the person. But really, they care if it turns into downtime. And And if it turns into downtime, they've got to own that. And they've got to kind of rationalize that with the organization. So who feels the shift and how much do they feel it? How much is an important question too. You really need this emotion to come up here. So in Check Solution, the talent acquisition director with hiring drag, you know, they might have a candidate that they really like and they can't get them over the line. Or they might have things stuck being researched and it takes 6 weeks. And by that time, folks move on. So, and that's who feels it. And by the way, the hiring managers feel that and the hiring managers make the C-suite feel that. So it trickles up in a good way. This is a good kind of flow of pain. P. if you will. And then, you know, there's a compliance aspect to this. So the head of HR needs to defend a program if it fails, not just on a, hey, we could be doing a better job, but hey, we now have a legal risk. For Subsalt, it's not, you know, research and data teams. It's really one, I think, but there's a data scientist who's trying to, or question asker who's trying to, um, uh, get an answer and they're, they're hitting a wall. But that is a story as old as time. What, what is more compelling here to me is this chief data and AI officer at, at this org— at this, you know, healthcare organization who's responsible for bringing safe medical treatments to patients faster is now going to get beat by the person who and institution who figures out how to use Subsalt, figures out how to get research done faster, and moves at AI speed, not human speed. So that's the real pain, right? That's the shift here. And hopefully you can see that by noodling these questions around, you can find what really, really is important to people. So losing out not being a top organization for this, that, or the other thing, you know, is vitally important. I'll leave it there. I was going to tell a story about my wife and Johns Hopkins, but not going to do it. So the next is the buyer's ambition. So we named the shift going on in the world. We named the buyer experience. I want you to think of this like a movie in your head. We named— what did we name? Oh, yeah, the buyer experience. Now we want to know what the buyer's real ambition is. What do they really want? What do they want the organization to become? And what do they want themselves? How do they want themselves to be viewed professionally? So this isn't your product's purpose. That's the key thing here. It's their purpose. So CFO doesn't dream about better accounting software. They want to look good. They want to add value. It's really, again, going back to empathy and trying to figure out a way to sell into the identity of the person it is that you're talking to. So again, Gong, we said no revenue officer wants more call recordings. They want to nail the forecast. They want to look like they've got their finger on the pulse. They want to understand what is going to happen before it happens. Not explain it afterwards because that costs them, right? It costs them sort of respect and capital within the organization. For Canva, nobody is going to pay to make life easy for designers. Oh, we've got this great tool. It's going to make life easy for you. What they want is to ship more stuff that looks good without waiting for that designer. So Again, there's an ambition for an organization and a way to frame something that isn't pretty designs. It's these templates will move more marketing out the door faster, cheaper, better. And that's really what people want. Back to Peloton, stationary bikes are old, old, old, 50, 60, 100 years old. I don't know how old they are. Nobody wants that. What they want are leaderboards and streaks and ways to rate their performance that make them feel good about themselves. themselves, especially if they're getting up at 5 to exercise. So in our live examples, um, what's your buyer's ambition? Uh, you know, for InCheck, it's not faster turnaround times. That's, that's not an ambition. That's a, that's a product feature, right? Um, it's to keep hiring moving and stand behind every decision. And the goal is, is not faster reports. It's confidence, confidence that you can stand Behind. So it's a feeling, right? For Subsalt, again, it's not faster data approvals. It's getting research out of the queue to allow the smart, intelligent people with your organization to solve real human problems. And by the way, your organization is going to look good by doing that. And by the way, the other guy's going to do it too, and he might Or she might move faster than you do. So the goal here is speed, but it's, it's really about competing to provide better outcomes. If, if anyone has specific questions, throw them in there in the chat. I'm, I'm happy to. I'm gonna— I'm just moving quickly. I'm not sure. I think this is supposed to be 55 minutes, so I'm, I'm getting close to the, to the capstone here. So now we need to name the enemy. We know the buyer, we know what they want. Oh no, this is the thing standing in their way. And it's an old belief, it's a broken process, it's a flawed system. It's one of those things. So Slack, you know, the enemy wasn't legacy communication tools, it wasn't email, it was email deluge. It was the fact that you went to a 1-hour meeting and came back and you had 200 emails. And you have to kind of go back and forth. Dollar Shave Club, you know, the emotion and the enemy isn't the grooming industry. It's, you know, it's simpler than that. It's, wait a minute, these— I'm paying how much for razor blades and I gotta go to CVS and wait while somebody unlocks a glass case to go give me the razor blades. You know, it's a pain in the ass. That's what the enemy is. It's an overpriced pain in the ass. DocuSign is another pain in the ass. They marketed it well, like the slow— I think they called it the print-sign-scan loop. So to get a document signed, or Calendly is another one, to get a meeting scheduled, there was this whole dance you had to do in email, or you could just give somebody your calendar. And it seems obvious now, but it didn't always work that way. So the enemy's never a competitor. It's never somebody who's doing less good of a job than you. It's oftentimes a belief, and it's some sort of pain that that causes. So what's the real enemy here in our live examples? I would say it's not slow, impersonal vendors that don't protect the business or employees. It's not how the other guys might do it. It's one and done screening because one and done is not enough. For Subsalt, the enemy is not the governance backlog. It's certainly not the committee. It's certainly not the need for HIPAA. It's just the results of it all. It's just that this soup doesn't taste good. It doesn't work right. And the best way to express that is things get stuck the queue, right? So the enemy here is the permission queue. And it helps to have, you know, sparkly language sometimes, and sometimes it helps to just kind of say it clearly. So it doesn't really matter how you say it. And I'll show you in the end here how it all comes together. And it's a bit of both. So what's the enemy costing them? So again, in our movie in our heads, We've got the hero, they have an ambition, something's standing in their way. What does that mean? Does it mean anything to them or is it something they can overcome easily? Because we want the cost to be as great as possible and believable. And I don't think it needs to be a number or a stat to be a cost. Again, it could be like Slack, for instance. This is a great example. Decisions buried in Slack. inboxes, and businesses lose output and people lose a feeling of empowerment. That's a super important one, right? Snowflake is data management. So if people have to wait days for the data, they lose confidence. So, you know, if I close my month end and it takes 15 days for me to get the numbers, now I'm 45 days away from something that might have happened in that in that window. So I just don't have confidence in things anymore, right? It doesn't feel right. Calendly, we talked about that one. So the enemy needs to be felt in some way. So in our live examples, InCheck, silent exposure to compliance risks and good candidates moving on. So these are these are the things talked about behind closed doors, right? If we don't do this, this will happen. We need to change our program because we're seeing good candidates leave. We need to change our program because the risk in compliance seems to be growing for us. For Subsalt, the enemy is an opportunity cost. It isn't waiting. You've been waiting your whole life. The whole scientific system has run on in this way up until now, right? And there was waiting and there was cost, but what you're really losing is the capacity to do more that you can never recover. So if you have a choice to wait 3 months or to get your data in the same day, how much research can you complete? How much good can you do in the world? You know, that's, that's a real cost. And by the way, that becomes visible, maybe not within your organization, but it becomes visible as you see other organizations adopting new way of working. Now we finally get to talk about our special sauce. So this is, this is where you can begin to speak to what the business does in a unique way. It's all in service of everything that we've talked about up until now. So the phrase I use all the time is, is your job is to become a guide worth following. And, and that's Yoda's job in Star Wars, for instance. He has to prove how cool he is, and then he knows some stuff, and he's not just a 700-year-old little green, green fella, but he's got skills, right? And that, that's what we're talking about here is skills, special sauce. And And, you know, I think some of these examples are, are pretty good. Um, Stripe doesn't say, you know, we have great documentation and we've got a, you know, again, it's can, can I get paid? And payments is, is something where there's— it's an industry where there's 100 different players behind every button you, you push once you're in that, in that payments section. Um, and if it fails, everybody fails, right? The, the everything fails. So So documentation is important, but having 7 lines of code so you don't have to build your own infrastructure and you can start collecting payments the same day is really what the special sauce is. It's easy. The PayPal button, it's easy. Dyson, you know, they didn't say we make premium vacuums. They said there's cyclone separation instead of bags, so you don't have to buy bags. They're dirty, and you'll never lose suction because the bags don't ever get clogged because there's no bags in there. So only Dyson could say that. And that's an example of what you want to say. What you don't want to say is we do it better. And a good way to try to frame this is we provide X so you can stop doing the old way and start doing things the new way. So for the live examples, the program for InCheck, you know, the program is maintained through hiring and beyond. So HR leaders stop discovering new exposure and risks and start defending every— and have the ability to defend every hire. That's probably written poorly, but it's the ability to defend the hire, not defending the hire. And the mechanism that supports that is, you know, access to a lot of source-verified records, in-house compliance team, and a US team to work with you. So it's people plus technology plus this notion of not being one and done, but more of a lifespan either of the employee or the workforce. Subsalt used to call themselves a synthetic data platform, which I don't know what that is. I don't think anybody knows what that is. But, you know, now they're moving in this direction. And none of this is, by the way, final for any of these companies, but one governed environment from first question to a defensible result. And you can, when you use this data, you can use it in the same database management that you're using now. So all the tools that you use, you can continue to use them, but privacy controls and release checks and evidence and audit and all the things that the committee used to do is built into the data. And the last one, and then we'll finally get to what this looks like, I did a little bit of like homepage writing and a positioning statement for each, is what category does this create? And this is where people get tripped up. I think a category might have a name that's catchy, but it needs to have some sort of hook, and it doesn't have to be the name. What it, what it needs to be is something a buyer can ask for. It needs to be something that you can put on a budget line item that an analyst can define. So again, a fair amount of work I do is, is trying to feed analysts a way to, to cover something in a positive way, which will attract investment for a startup. And you want something that other companies can't credibly do. So you want to name the market for what the buyer is experiencing. Again, it's not about your product. You want to use familiar words if possible and make it big enough that other people can play in it. If it's only something that you can do, it really isn't a category. I mean, I suppose you could— there is sort of jargon out there that says become a category of one. But I don't necessarily believe that. And I'll take you through what this looks like. So for Intech, the category that we came up with, and again, it's not final, but I like this quite a bit, is workforce integrity monitoring. So it's about, well, first of all, monitoring moves them from a purchase to a program. Integrity names a state, is a state of being. You know, it's not a report you order. It's a, it's a way, it's, it's something your business achieves. And workforce does a good job of saying the whole employee life cycle. And, and it feels powerful to me. So workforce integrity monitoring is a discipline of continuously keeping screening programs aligned with changing laws, roles, and risk. It replaces static reporting. Reports with active oversight. Active oversight might be a bit much, but again, we're moving quick here and, and, and we're trying to hone in on, on this. It's, it's, it's not perfect, but what does that result in? So that results in a lot of things, and you can take all of this, um, and use it to power your go-to-market strategy. Uh, um, but you know, for the purposes of this, of this, um, discussion, I just wrote a homepage headline and some copy. So right at the top of the homepage, uh, for InCheck, you might see a headline like this: A background check is one moment in time. Workforce trust has to last. That's an emotion. It feels something there. Um, I'm not talking about the product. I've named the category workforce trust or workforce integrity. Again, it's not about the words, it's about the feeling that you get, and I think that does a good job of it. And then the copy pays it off: Build a workforce you can stand behind. Day one and beyond. InCheck replaces set-and-forget screening with actively managed programs that stays current as hiring conditions change. So hiring keeps moving, surprises stay out of the process, and every hire is compliant. Done. Done. Now you can— everybody can breathe easier and we can talk about our product. But you have to— you got to go through all of this in order to, to get to that point. All right, last one here. SubSalt. What, what I think it creates, and this one is, again, it's, it's very much a work in progress, is clinical data readiness. Clinical data readiness is a discipline of making clinical data governed, usable, and ready before it's requested. It removes— excuse me, it moves compliance out of the approval queue and into the data itself. So what does the homepage say? It says build governance into your clinical data, get research out of the queue. P. Again, the research out of the queue holds all of the emotion. Wait a minute, how do we do that? Um, and it's, it's not the committee that's bad, right? So that— so I think this headline does a pretty solid job. Uh, Subsalt turns project-by-project data access into a repeatable governed path so researchers, analysts, and AI teams can publish faster without weakening patient protection. And that last bit's huge, right? It's It's all about patient protection. It's all about patient outcomes. Nothing that a hospital does isn't about that, or should do isn't about that. Jessica might disagree, but, you know, in a perfect world, that's, you know, what people are going for is protection, quality outcomes. So I think this headline does a fair job there. If anyone has any other questions, I went, I think, 5 or 7 minutes long, but I'm happy to just reach out to me in the chat for this event. I'm also including— we don't need to do this— take a screenshot or get your camera out and try out the category design lab that I created. And it's these same questions, and all you have to do is put in your URL. And it will spit back suggested answers for these questions and then allow you to change the answers. And then it'll get to work on helping you think about the category. It's not perfect, but it's what I use to onboard people and move quickly and look smarter. So it will take what I took an hour to explain and actually do it for you in less than 10 minutes. I mean, it'll do it for you in about 2 minutes, and then you refine it for 10 or 15 minutes. And you've got something. All you need is a free Claude account to use it. And the other thing is just reach out to me at david@gangbusters, and I'm happy to help. So