Founder Clarity Through Category Design for Fundraising, Product, and Culture w/ Lauren Dunford, CEO of Guidewheel

I'm sure you've heard the impressive statistics of what category design can do to dominate a market.

But have you heard about one of the greatest value propositions that it has to offer a founder early in her journey? Clarity welcome to the Category Thinkers podcast, a feature of the Category Thinkers community. And while other category design podcasts focus on these success cases and the formulas of category design, we like to talk to people right in the middle of the action. And that is why this episode today is with Lauren Dunford from Guide Wheel, who is a founder and CEO of a very compelling company in the mechanical space with some really big ambitions. And we talk about this idea of Category Design as a agent of clarity for a founder. We talk about how she has found use in implementing languaging for fundraising and sales and culture building. And we also talk about this idea of knowing which problem to prioritize being the key to the amount of impact you actually get to make. Today's conversation is hosted by a couple of our founders, Mike Damphouse, AKA Damp, whose company, Category Design Advisors, helped Lauren work through Guide Wheels pov and me, Pablo Gonzalez, the CEO over at Bethestage Live, who in a previous life was a green building consultant and actually weirdly understands the problem that Lauren is trying to solve here. We'd like to thank our sponsors, Category Design Advisors, whom you can visit@categorydesignadvisors.com Category Design Advisors has helped hundreds of companies figure out their pov, understand Category Design and align around it. I recently attended one of their workshops in New York City and if I was a company that was looking to invest in Category design, I would definitely, definitely, definitely go to categorydesignadvisors.com and our other sponsor is Bethestage Live, my company who coordinates and produces this podcast and the community strategy. If you want to work with a company that can help you create content that deeply understands category design and how to create content around it, go to be the stage.

And last but not least, what we really want you to do is go to categorythinkers.com join our free Slack community of over 500 other category designers and stop just listening to this show and become part of the conversation. You can do that@categorythinkers.com go into the Free Slack community, join us and and pop in and say hello and start connecting. Now I leave you to this conversation where Damp kicks us off talking about how him and Lauren started working together.

You and I worked together in the middle of COVID I think it was spring of 2021. We still haven't met face to face. And I consider you one of our more successful client projects out there for category design advisors. And I think it's a great story because you're at a seed level, you're just building your team, just formalizing the product, and yet you decided to make a big investment in your company by working with Kevin and I to put your category design plan together. Tell us about that decision, because it's a big decision when you're at seed level.

Yeah. I think it starts because we knew we were building something that had the potential to be huge and that what was motivating us was realizing that potential in terms of impact on the planet from the public good purpose that we have. And we only get to have that impact if we build a phenomenally profitable, successful and scalable company. So we knew what we were doing was swinging for the fences in terms of going for that massive impact. And we're encountering this big problem, which is that when we would talk with customers, they would categorize us as something that was only a small portion of that, either as a mes, a manufacturing execution system, or as machine monitoring. And it just. We could not figure out how to convey what we were building to customers efficiently. Some of them would get it and just grab the idea and run with it, and others wouldn't. And that challenge of how do we build for maximum impact and really go for it? When I read play bigger, just everything clicked. And I was like, okay, we're building a new category. That's why people aren't getting what it is that we're talking about. That's why they're redescribing us back incorrectly, but also why some people are seeing it and getting the vision. We need to figure out a way to effectively build out the category, not just guide wheel. And that's great if other people want to build and join us. This type of thing needs to exist in the world, not just we want to do this as a company ourselves, strategically.

People are always frustrated when they start to see competition. But a category is not going to be built without competitors.

Yes.

Right. You need that. The multiple logos in the lower left quadrant for somebody to say this is real. If anything, you might learn from them. And by the way, you don't have to be first to market, but you just have to be first with the most compelling point of view to win that category. And that's what you touched on originally was telling the story was a challenge.

I can add one more thing there too. So just on that topic, of why did this make sense for us at that early stage? I think that was the perfect time for us to do this. And the reason is it wasn't just customers who were either bucketing us incorrectly or not quite getting it, but also we need to make sure that we were clear about what, what are we building and why. So that as we brought on more investors, more teammates, more customers, we were aligning ourselves with the people who were mission driven with us in building towards that same thing. So we actually took the category point of view and we not only shared it with every potential investor during our series a fundraise and then the goal was, hey, attract the people who actually want to do what we're doing and go after this big vision and impact with us. And then if people aren't aiming for that, let them opt out. That's great. We want the people along on this ride who are building what we're building and since then have shared with every new employee who joins Guide Wheel often in the recruiting process. That point of view statement, we don't call it a POV because no one knows what that is, but we call it factory ops. What are we building and why? And we share it so that in that same way people who are along with us on this journey are, are in it for that aligned vision versus thinking we're building something that we're not. And getting that whole company, whole group of investors and whole potential and current talent aligned has been really important at an early stage as well. It's been hugely helpful in making sure we don't get distracted and that we're all aligned.

That's awesome. The fact that you're using it across the board. So many people have the misconception that category design and writing a point of view is marketing. It's messaging, it's positioning. Okay, it is. You're going to end up with that in the end, right? Marketing will be the tip of the spear, but is more about the process and the consensus building that you do as a team and the consensus building you do on how you describe things. Is the word red or is it crimson? Make sure everybody agrees because that is your North Star. That's your mission. And what we found, we've done 46 projects since we started the company, since the book came out. What we found is the most successful projects that we worked on were people that had that aspiring vision to be the home run. It wasn't just, hey, I'm going to hit a triple and I'm going to have a billion dollars in tam, it's no, I'm going to be the home run. I'm going to have 4 billion in TAM and I'm going to build a category like no Tomorrow. Those are the ones that win 100%.

What we're building has the potential to truly be the real time layer for every factory on the planet. And there are 10 million factories on the planet and it's building with that mission in mind. Not that we're going to do all that tomorrow, but that's what we're building towards that helps us all stay aligned into product decisions that we're making, strategy decisions that we're making, who we're bringing on in terms of talent, who we bring on in terms of investors. It's the entire company's strategy.

It's interesting. You just touched on what's good for the world and what's good for people. It's a whole different touch zone than most CEOs talk to. What does being good for the world or being good for people have to do with anything in this world? And that's a loaded question, but I want to just get you going on it.

Yeah. And there are lots of ways, we all know it, but so many ways to do good for the world that have nothing to do with what we're doing. We are doing one tiny thing, but we want to do that one tiny thing very well and have the maximum impact we can have in doing that thing. And we incorporated from the start as a public benefit corporation. So mission was a big piece of what we were building from the day we became a company. And specifically our mission was let's move the needle in a meaningful way on climate. And we will not get to move the needle in a meaningful way on climate if we're not doing it in a way that connects to manufacturers, top goals, that's profitable, that's scalable, et cetera. So we're very much a for profit business. But that mission has been key then in the category design process. What we zeroed in on is really crisply defining how are we having that impact. And just for those that are hearing about this for the first time, what we're building, factory ops is taking the kinds of tools of real time visibility on the plant floor that have always been essential to drive revenue and margin from factories. And we're making them plug and play and accessible and inclusive for any size factory on the planet by starting with using the electrical heartbeat of the equipment to get it into the cloud in real time. And it's that way of starting by using the electrical heartbeat, that means that we're building in from the start. The tools manufacturers will need to hit their energy, sustainability and climate goals, but without them having to care about that at first. So as we wrote the category statement, it's not just let's drive really fast value on the things that your operations care about, revenue and margin, but. But let's build in sustainability into those operating workflows and magnify the impact we have on sustainability by getting those workflows used every day by people at all level, operator, machine operator, through to CEO across the factories and across the manufacturing company. And let's have this be a positive flywheel of impact on the business and the planet and more and more impact on both because we're doing them together rather than separate.

It's been two years since we put a version 1.0 on the POV. What have some of your category challenges been over the two years? Has context shift occurred which caused you to maybe modify the pov? Has product development gone in a direction that caused you to rethink some of the issues? Just give us the journey over two years. Categories take years to build. You're two years in.

Yeah, totally. So for good or for bad, the POV is still in basically its original form. What we share with talent, what we share with investors, and what's informing what's on our website and what we talk about with customers. There aren't that many things that have shifted in terms of the challenges that we're solving, how we're solving those challenges, or the long term vision. I imagine there will over the next few years be lots of ways in which things change, but so far we were general enough to be lasting, at least for the first few years in how we define those things. There are lots of tailwinds that have put more pressure on the problems that we solve for manufacturers, both within using existing assets to drive more productivity and profitability with the economic pressure that they're feeling. Not across every industry, it's all different, but more and more there is extreme pressure on the same things that there was already pressure around, but even more. And then there's also these big tailwinds in terms of the increasing pressure on sustainability, making that sustainability impact that we have by using the electrical heartbeat and layering on all of the climate impact piece even more important. So that piece has gone up in priority even though on the production floor, production will still win every fight. If you're not getting product out the door. Lots of efficiency go out the window. Sustainability has increased relative to other things in the priority it's being given because of the pressure from investors, regulation, etc. So what we've seen is the challenges that we're solving, still the right ones. The way that we're solving them, still general enough in the way that we've written that category statement to not need tweaking at this moment, but they've increased further in priority. We have played a lot with language. I think the POV that we wrote is still the thing I share with talent as folks are in the recruiting process, et cetera. But for our customers, we've gotten much, much better at making sure we're speaking their langu. So we don't put the POV language on the website anymore. I think now we've got crisp ways of talking about it with customers that matches more the language that they use. And they were part of that original process as well. And we probably could have gotten a little bit of that from the start as well. But it's been helpful to continue to refine that piece.

Yeah, the POV is a living document. People need to remember that it's your document. It can change. When Covid hit, we had to rewrite five or six of them within a month. People should never be afraid to adjust their POV if it makes sense. It's not cast in stone and to be ignored. The electric heartbeat. That's exactly how I described to Pablo earlier today. We were talking, I go, yeah, think of it as a fitbit for the electrical pipeline in a company. It's monitoring the electrical activity through a very passive way, and it has huge impact. It's great to see the sustainability story still part of the story.

Even more core. It's always been core, but yeah, very much part of the story. And it's been interesting. I think we were thoughtful in how we built it, that I'm a big believer that this thing should change and evolve a lot. And when it makes sense to evolve, we absolutely will. But I think we were smart in including things we knew would be part of the roadmap sooner rather than later. Like other sensors layered on top of the electrical heartbeat. Now those are reality instead of coming in the future. So what's happened with the POV is a lot of the things that we had listed as future developments now are just real developments. And so as soon as we hit the end of that list, then we'll have to add, you know, other things and more. But it's been exciting.

It's exactly how we describe it. When we did one last week. And we say, look, if you remember the concept of the adjacent possible, right, you need to sprinkle in the promise of the future, but not so much that you scare people away. And now you're getting there. Right. One year, two year down the road, that blue section just keeps coming closer and your category keeps emerging.

Yeah. It's exciting to see it playing out the way that we thought. And it's not because we're not checking against the market and constantly open to revising if we need to. It's that a lot of the things that we were careful in doing our homework with and really digging deep with customers, really digging deep in terms of existing solutions and finding what was truly new and different and damp. I know you said something like, ah, I now know this thing needs to exist in the world. There was a moment when you came back from a weekend and said, I'm in. This needs to happen. I think we did enough of that homework together that it has stood at least these first few years. And I'm excited to keep building and adjusting as the world changes as well.

Lauren, I'm really curious about the practicality and the application of the category design work. As somebody that came from the sustainable built environment kind of industry 15 years ago, really hard to sell sustainability as a abstract concept without solving a problem. And when I hear you talking about the POV and you say words like the electrical heartbeat, instantly my eyes perk up because it has this kind of, oh, man, that really should exist in the world. But then when you talked about this idea of moving the POV from top of fold of your website to downtime.

Right.

I guess what I'm curious about is in this work, I think it's been pretty clear that you've used the POV to raise money. You use the POV to create culture or attract talent. How much of a role does the category design play in your actual sales and in your conversations and those kinds of things.

Yeah. So the POV actually starts with downtime in the pov. We're not talking about something that's different than what I'm saying. Here is the top problem we solve in the pov. And we worked really closely on this. And jam. I know I was a little bit obnoxious. I was like, we have to get the mission in there and the sustainability piece in. But we actually started first with downtime in the pov. We just started with. Production is being tracked on pen and paper. These key metrics are being tracked manually in so many factories. Let's start with the benefit that matters most and has the fastest impact on the bottom line for manufacturers. And the POV starts with that. And then the sustainability piece comes in second. Which is exactly how our conversations with customers go. There's not green on our website right now. Maybe that'll change as sustainability tailwinds further increase. But right now it's all about downtime on our website. It's all about downtime in our initial conversations, increasingly more about the other factors that drive production as well. Downtime, cycle time or overall equipment effectiveness, other metrics of productivity. But we don't usually talk about sustainability with customers in those initial conversations and they're not in the top of the pov. Because what we found is the most effective way to have the biggest impact is to layer in sustainability once the team is already using the system. And if you start with the reverse and start with sustainability first, it ends up being a few people and often not the ones with the most power who use the system and maybe not even enough to form habits and actually have impact day over day. But if you start first with the most important problem for the people who are getting product out the door and are going to be the ones who make the decisions when push comes to shove, and then layer in sustainability too, like you can see the scoreboard here to the scoreboards to the day to day workflows, that's much more effective than starting with a green.

This to me is so crucial for our friend that's listening right now that has a business that is a mission driven. As a founder, you're heavily driven by the altruism and by the impact and all these different things. And it can be so frustrating to think that people don't want to engage in that conversation when you're so passionate about it. But the reality of it is, and the thing that drew me to category design is the truth that if you're not starting with solving a Monday morning problem, you can't even enter that conversation. And the long term mission that you are trying to achieve and the impact that you're trying to achieve gets to happen. If you can walk in the door with showing somebody how to have a tangible win in their personal life, in their career, in their work week kind of thing is that your experience and how it's played out 100%.

I love the term Monday morning problem. And I'll take it a little bit further because I actually I found people are excited to talk about sustainability and that is also distracting and hard because we started by hearing people's excitement to Talk about sustainability, hearing them say this is a really important problem and building an energy management system for them to help solve that problem. And then we realized what people do might not be what they say. And we saw our initial group of customers that had been sold the energy management system were using it once a month or once a week. Not enough to actually have big impact, but there was this smaller group of customers that was using it all the time, every day for reducing downtime on the plant floor. And so just building on what you were saying, I think it's also, it's so tempting to hear what you want to hear in those conversations and hear that something is a priority. But the importance of seeing what truly is the priority when push comes to shove. And if it's not number one, even if it's number six or seven, you can't really make changes easily if it's priority number six or seven. So let's shift out of selling two and starting with six or seven. Let's remove that from the conversation for now. Because also you won't succeed if you try to do two things. You're going to succeed much better if you do one thing really well first. So flip it to the top priority, like we did with, hey, let's make sure you're getting product out the door, increasing productivity, reducing downtime. Let's do one thing really well first. And once that thing is going really well, then let's layer on the other things. But let's not try to start with two. Let's start with one. So I just agree completely with what you said and would add that sometimes, even when they're excited to talk about it, that can be tempting, but also even worse in some ways. It's also, I want to make sure it's great that manufacturers care about sustainability. That is awesome. I want to reinforce that it's increasingly happening. What we want to not lose sight of is what is the quantifiable impact at the end of the day. And the impact is going to be biggest at the end of the day if we engage the full team in their day to day, in their Monday mornings, with sustainability being a part of that versus something separate that needs to happen. So that's the message I want to get across, is it's not that it shouldn't be part of the conversation, it's fantastic. It is. But let's make it part of priority number one versus trying to do two things at once.

You just mentioned this idea of a human propensity to talk about what you're most excited about as opposed to the thing that's most important. How did you reach that insight? Was it through this category design process and or testing it in some way? Can you talk me a little bit through about the aha moment of pushing that to the top?

Yeah, it was prior to the category design process. So we came into category design having had that insight handed to us on a platter by our customers. I like to say there's most of the great things in Guidewheel have been the ideas of our customers and then great execution by the team. Our customers helped us reach that insight by showing us what they did in the platform and by showing us that by far the most useful things to them, as evidenced by what they were logging into and using every day all the time, versus what they maybe brought up in meetings with us, was the productivity piece. So that insight at first was hard to see because we wanted people to be using the energy management functionality, but once we saw this cluster of users that were using Guide Wheel all the time for this other thing, then it was on us to say, oh, okay, let's show up at their factories and shadow them in their day to day and ask as many questions as we can about what it is that's going on for them and learn why it is and what they're accomplishing and enter that phase of learning from our customers to make sure we've really hammered home this insight and then we pivoted the entire platform around that and that was in advance. And so by the time we came to the category design process, we had a pretty good theory of change, about how change was actually going to happen in terms of both driving those core profitability metrics and then also the impact we want to have on the planet.

What are your thoughts as it pertains to AI right now and how it's going to impact data driven companies like yours?

I think the impact will be huge and we've invested in this from the start. Machine learning can look at all that data for patterns, diagnosing anomalies in machines and productions. As it learns, the FactoryOps platform will be able to recommend actions such as predictive maintenance, further lowering downtime, and we've ended up, in the years since we wrote that, we've invested extremely heavily in this area. So we've got an incredible AI team. We've got AI models already in production that are hugely powerful and really surprising in the insights that we're able to get from that electrical heartbeat and the labels and context that our users and the many plants on Guide wheel have added. So we think this is transformative and an area where continuing to invest not just in what we're doing already, but in all of the new technology and advancements that are coming along is core to continuing to deliver the most value for our customers and continuing to have the biggest impact. Because a lot of those patterns can apply just as well in the sustainability world as they can on bottom line profitability impact.

So you're looking at AI the way most should. It's. You've taken it out of the hype mode and you're saying it's a tool, it's plugged in, it's looking at what's going on and it's giving us insights and, and we're constantly learning from it.

Yeah.

Lauren, we talk a lot about the idea that category design is a business discipline, not a marketing thing. Right. Like we've spoken a little bit about marketing to fundraisers, marketing to employees and things of that sort. I wonder if you have any stories as far as how the lens of category design has informed the way that you steer the company from the future of the business model or the offer or things of that sort of.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's so funny to hear you call it marketing to investors and marketing to employees because I actually, I see it as filtering out and as aligning strategies. What I'm trying to do is say here's what we are, here's what we're building and why and either join in and this is what we're doing or don't, and that's fine. So in my mind, I'm not actually trying to like use it as marketing to attract. I'm trying to make sure there's strategic alignment. And so it's more a way of being transparent and explicit than of kind of marketing. And I would say in terms of strategic decisions, I refer back to that document in our product roadmap discussions and our Strat team off sites about how we're building and what we're doing. And it really is in my mind, much more a strategy document than a marketing document. Because I think also marketing is a, an enactment of strategy. Yeah. We haven't built anything on the roadmap that doesn't fit really align to that core category document. I don't intend to. We'll update the document before we start deviating from it on the roadmap because anything that we're building that's outside of that, it's not moving us towards that end goal and the impact we want to have. On the world and the scale and potential that we can reach. And if we determine it can and should, then let's add it in to the way we think about strategy and long term vision as well and then everything stays aligned.

Can you, can you put me into the room there on one of these conversations? That's product roadmap pov referring to the document and no names or anything like that, but the kind of characters and how it happens of how you steer it back to that or it might get away from that and things to look for.

Yeah. And definitely. And this isn't only me and I would say the document is also so much part of what we're building anyway that it's embodied in how we do things. A specific example is say a customer asks for a customization where we would have to encode if X customer then Y. That's different from everyone else using the platform. That's going to be something that's just a hard no for us. We're always going to build guide wheel to be extensively configurable but never customized to one customer. If a customer needs something to accomplish an impact that's really aligned to that POV and going to be useful to others, let's make it a toggle and a configuration that they can do. But towards that vision of manufacturing excellence for all the world's 10 million factories, customizing and becoming a custom job shop or development firm isn't part of that. We're building a configurable platform. So that's an easy one where we wouldn't need to refer back to anything or something like that. But it is making sure we're staying aligned on that strategy. One that maybe was a little bit more complex for us was thinking about when do we add other sensors besides electricity and if so, how do we do that? And in that conversation it was. Electricity is really great to start with. It gives you so much bang for your buck. It gives you runtime, downtime, all of those patterns that can help you get ahead of failures and problems and it gives you all the sustainability and energy information. So we actually don't really want to work with customers that don't want to start with that as the foundation and can't get value from that first sensor. Let's not have another sensor be the starting point. But will those customers want to add on other sensors and can they get tremendous value from that? Absolutely. So enabling the addition of other sensors only after a customer was already getting good value from that first real time layer of current was one of those strategic decisions where we had to refer back to our long term vision because there was such potential to get distracted and say okay, how can we do this in a way that it aligns and drives that long term but doesn't distract us in the short term.

And Lauren, what I'm hearing here is something that's so universal, right? Like I'm not I describe myself as the small E entrepreneur in the room, right? Like I'm a service business that's thinking of category design and doing consulting and whatnot and I'm not in this venture backed fast growth world. But the value of clarity as a founder, no matter if you are in step one of Big Idea or series A, what happens next or who do we hire, who do we not, what feature do we add or who we don't, who is the VC that we actually want to work with, who are down the line partners that we want to work with. And category design is that lightning rod slash sorting mechanism of clarity for what next steps should or more importantly should not be is something that's really ringing true to me in this conversation from everything you said that I don't think we've ever hit before on a past podcast, this idea of reducing mental load for the founder because you have this real clarity around the problem and that's what you're going after. Am I ringing true to you there?

Yes. And we relabeled the POV statement. We call it Factory Ops what we're building and why so that we share it not just as some background on a category, but this is what we're building and why. And the what we're building then informs all of those decisions quite easily.

It's really interesting because again I go back to the projects over the years that have been the ones that are I can see the home run coming if it hasn't already happened is the ones that have that passion and drive and can see something no one else can see. And as you said, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Then let's build the damn thing and make it a category. And from day one when I saw that in you, I was pleased. I love I'd much rather do that work on those projects than work on the company that is filing S1 documents to go public. Yeah, that's exciting. But they're already who they are and that it's you have a little bit less impact at that point. We can increase valuations. That's easy. We did that. But by then they usually are who they are. Let me ask a different question. Go on a complete tangent. Back in August, we ran a workshop in New York City and there was a young woman that joined. She's creating a company that is a good for you food product. It's a drink. And her father stumbled on the idea together and the amount of energy I see in her and the amount of what she's been able to do in the past six months with very little resources. She's doing a small safe round right now to move forward. She just got accepted into Antlers accelerator program and yet she's been able to get tremendous way down the road. And I think a lot of it is she surrounded herself with a lot of advisors and I'm one. She asked me to be a formal advisor a couple months ago and what did I do? I brought in a food scientist I know I brought in, I call him the father of poop. He, he's got patents in the constipation space.

But, you know, surrounding yourself with great people, regardless of if they're paid, compensated in equity or just helping because they're there to help, I think is a big part of what startups do today. It's not like it used to be. It used to be you needed 10 people and $10 million to get to an MVP. Today that's 10, probably eight people too many and 8 million too much. And it's a whole different world. But just give me your thoughts on it. The I know that you had the company had multiple phases of how you grew and raised money at certain times. What are your thoughts? What advice would you give Rachel right now? Because she's toying with do I need to do a 10 million a round or should I go for a, a 1 million super seed round to get me further along?

I would say there are probably a lot of people who would be better qualified to give advice. So I'll give one thought that comes to mind. Based on what you described, I agree with how important it is to surround yourself with great people. How important it is also to learn from what's been done before and how many awesome and super wise people we've found in the manufacturing space. So we're not reinventing the wheel. And in each discipline, whether it's customer success, sales, marketing, just there are incredible people out there and, and the more you can, you know, surround yourself with that is fantastic. So sounds like she's already getting that advice, which is great. When we were approaching our Series A, the drumbeat of the company was product market fit. We did not want to go out and get more cash or raise a Series A until we had product market fit nailed and evidence and data behind that. And product market fit is always going to involve evolve. We're always going to continuous improve, continuously improve that. But that was the drumbeat for us of when it made sense to go out and raise a Series A. Not advice, but a thought based on what we were thinking about at that moment.

Let me throw something at you. There's an article that we just published a month or two ago about how product market fit, when Marc Andreessen coined that, about 20 something years ago, or at least made it a buzzword of the day. As category designers, we think it should be market product fit. Create your market, solve the problem, and then put product in there. It's a different way to approach what you do. But I'm curious, and I know this is the first time I've shared this with you. I'm curious if that triggered any thoughts for you. Yeah, you're right. We did have a product, but it wasn't until we understood the problem in the market that we knew how to position them. You know what I mean? Yeah. Give me a little freestyle on that.

I think both are great ways to think about it. For us, it was about the problem we're solving and then iterations of the product to get that right. And where we continued to refine as our product improved was also who do we sell to and what problem do we solve for them? And getting more and more specific around that. So I guess a lot of that resonates, and a lot of that for us was regardless of whether it's product, market fit, or another name, what we were looking for was pull. A feeling that this was getting pulled from us instead of pushed at folks and data behind that feeling, data being starting and expanding very quickly to additional plants, or starting and using it like crazy and achieving great results and, you know, more users being added in. But that feeling of pull was what mattered to us and what we were trying to encapsulate with the word product market fit.

The way you're describing pull is you saw the problem, you saw the market, and you pulled the product into it. Is that where you're going? If so, that's exactly the market product fit, you know, concept. You've articulated it differently, I think so.

We would always start in our conversations with folks of what's the problem? Do you actually have this problem? Otherwise, let's not talk. And the problem is we have a certain number of assets and we're losing productivity on those assets and we need a way to get that additional productivity out. And then that's where Guide Wheel comes in and Factory Ops comes in as the solution.

Now put your CEO hat on your CFO hat and look backwards and tell me whether or not I've been wanting to write this article and I need to survey a handful more of our client CEOs to get the story. Tell me if you think that the work you did on category design was a P and L expense or a balance sheet investment.

I think of it as a balance sheet investment because of the impact on not only valuations but also the quality of investors that we get to work with. And all of that being a flywheel of expansion and impact and success so very much in my mind, an investment.

Awesome. I gotta write this article. Lauren, any thoughts or questions that have come to you during the show or that we didn't touch on that you want to raise?

I'm curious what's changed in the two years in terms of how you work with companies on categories?

We had an incredible couple of years because of COVID.

The work we do is so much more effective when I can see your eyes in a room and when your co founder rolls their eyes, I can see that dynamic and we can get consensus and in a room is the way to do it. Doing what we do over zoom was so challenging, but what it forced us to do was to rethink a lot of how we do things. So we've developed a couple of new exercises and tools that help get through the discussion easier. Where we used to just for instance, if you remember right, day one of the workshop week, we beat up the problem till the nth degree. Right? We just kept coming back, what's the problem? Who's the problem for? What are the ramifications of not solving the problem? We still do that, but we have, we have a tool that we use that we find makes it easier to start the discussion called the category formula. There's we'll put a link in the show notes to an article that describes it. We've got another concept we refer to came out of the VC world. Mike Maples in Hemant in Asia, Mike Maples of Floodgate and Heymont of General Catalyst. They talk about backcasting, where you can see where you're going to be and then wind it back as to what you need to do today to be there. And we blended that idea with the adjacent possible, which you're familiar with and how sprinkling the vision into your story is so Important, but then being able to execute, that's where the back casting comes in. How do I get myself to there two years from now? So we build a lot more of those discussions into the workshops. All in all, Category design as a discipline has evolved. That's why we started Category Thinkers. Category thinkers has over 600 members now, and it's all 600 people that think about categories all day long. It's exciting to see the discussion that goes on. And it's an open Slack channel. It's a podcast, which we're recording for now and the podcast now after. I think we're on week 10. Ish. I think we're like over 1500 downloads an episode, which to me, with 600 members, 1500 downloads. Ish. After 10 weeks, I think it's a hell of a success. And I'm glad people are absorbing everything we're giving to them. Pass the word. In fact, somebody recently reached out to us as a referral from you that said, you should check out Category Thinkers and Damp and Kevin, et cetera. And word of mouth is still what's pushing this category along, but it's getting to the point now where it's. It's a discipline that people are putting on the resumes now.

So exciting.

Pablo, anything you got?

My big aha moment was the value of clarity. I think as we have the conversations that unite category designers at any level. And the need to do this stuff from a founder's mindset or a CEO's mindset or anything else is the idea that you need to find lanes, you need to find bumper lanes to stop you from going off the rails in the infinite things of. In the infinite realms of possibility. And you need to find ways to accelerate action. And from everything that Lauren spoke about, it feels like that's both for the founder and for the client and for the stakeholder investor and for the teammate that's wondering whether or not they want to buy in and this is what they want to do. So that's really what I took out of this conversation. And I really appreciate that, Lauren. That's super valuable for me thinking that way.

Thank you. And definitely, totally agree that value of clarity is not to be underestimated.

There you go. Another conversation designed to help you think like a category designer. Please support Our Sponsors category, DesignAdvisors.com and BeTheStage Live, because they're the ones footing the bill for this thing. So you can enjoy it. But more than anything, we'd love to hear from you, whether it's in our community or you could leave us a review for this podcast. If you're enjoying this thing, subscribe to it. Hit five stars. Let us know what you think. We could really, really use that. And don't forget, stop just listening to this thing. Join the conversation by going to categorythinkers.com joining the free Slack community and come meet the other 500+category designers just like you. See you in there.