Episode #669 - Mastering Category Design with Kevin Maney, Partner at Category Design Advisors

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I am here with Kevin Maney. I'm saying that right. Am I on the mane.

Absolutely.

And Kevin, I'm excited to see some. I know you've written a lot of great books, we're going to get into all that. But why do you have so many guitars in your background? I can't. Hang on, I'm going to show you something. Just so you'll see. We're kindred spirits.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, this is custom.

Very nice.

Out of the Gibson shop. It's a custom shop, but I got a banjo, a master tone banjo hanging on the next to it. But anyway. Excellent. So have you been playing all your life?

Yeah, I've been playing since I was a kid of some instrument or other. And later in life, actually in my 40s, I ended up really getting into songwriting and I've been in a couple of bands that both of them have blasted for a decade or more that were really interested in just doing original material which is not easy to find.

Right.

We have a band in New York that plays regularly, plays pubs around here. We're playing a lot of songs I write, we're playing some. Some covers and things like that. But that's. I mean, I notice you've got a lot of art stuff there. You know, that sort of form of expression. The other way of expression is wonderful to have. And that's my other way of expressing myself is through songs.

Well, once we get some foundational things down, let's. I'd love to talk about that because I think it adds a lot. Especially rather than just plunk around the house, you put a band together and you go out and get in front of people and you're taking it to another level is part of having some fun. But also you learn stuff that relates and informs everything else you found to be true in your life. So how did you start off, Kevin? I mean, you've written any bestsellers? We're going to get into that. Describe yourself. What are you most proud of as far as your accomplishments that you would like when you look back on it, the things that you felt the greatest about.

Wow. Okay. Well, in a very broad way, what I've done throughout my career is told stories about the technology industry and about what technology is doing to society and how it's changing our lives and Whether it was columns that I wrote for USA Today for a long time, 20 plus years, or magazine stories or the books that I've written, or for that matter, some of the songs that I've written have actually gone down that path. And then now in the later part of my career is working with startup companies, help them understand how to tell their stories and actually help them understand what their stories even are, because a lot of them don't know that. And seeing how much it helps them and helps the public understand what technology is all about, the players in it, how things work, that's been sort of the high line of my whole career is that's what it's all been about. And the fact that I've had an impact of some sort, doing that has been really satisfying.

Yeah. And you've got, I mean, just one of your books, over 150,000 copies that we know of the Play Bigger, right? Our pirate streamers and innovators create and dominate markets. Is that the most recent one or.

No, I've published three books since. Let's talk about that one for a second because yeah, let's do it, let's do it. Because Play Bigger changed my life more than a lot of things that have happened in my career. So first of all, just on the outcome side, is that by far the best selling book. In fact, now we put together probably about a 250,000 copies sold around the world. By far the best selling book I've ever been a part of. But then Playback proposed this concept that we called category design. And now that has turned into a strategic advisory business startups, venture capitalists, whatever, read the book, they call us up and say, please help us do what you wrote about because it really works. I mean, I'm a writer. Like when I put this stuff down, if I was like, I bet it surprises anybody that this stuff actually works. It changes, you know, the way companies think about themselves. And now this whole thing has become, it's become a movement. There are like hundreds of people who describe their jobs as category designers based on what we wrote about. And in fact, just in the last couple of weeks, this new community launched called Category Thinkers. It has like 400 members of people who just all believe in this stuff. So the impact of this thing has been phenomenal beyond anything that I've ever been a part of.

Now did you create that term category design?

We did, yeah. Yeah. So a little background story of the book was I had by that point I'd written, I don't know, four or five books probably and been a technology writer for ages.

What does that mean, a technology writer?

Yeah, sure. Let's go way back for a second. I started. So my. I grew up in Binghamton.

Where are you from? Where were you?

I grew up in Binghamton, New York.

Okay.

A small town, Binghamton, New York. So Binghamton, New York happens to be essentially the place where IBM started. There's a little town called Endicott right next door. And that's where the heart and soul of IBM was up until like the 90s. So I grew up in a town where IBM was the dominant force. When I got out of. I wanted to write, be a writer. I wanted to be a journalist. So I got out of college, I got offered a job at the local newspaper. And one of the openings they had was a business reporter. And I wasn't particularly trained in technology or business. It was all in journal, but I thought that was interesting. Business reporter, you start writing about technology. And I got very lucky because this was like the mid to late 80s, right about the time that personal computers took off, people started becoming very interested in technology. And so I just stuck with it and rode that wave. Ended up at USA Today writing regular weekly column about technology and the industry and the players in it.

What would a typical week at USA Today writing about technology? Would it be whatever came up with the editor suggested to you, were you, you know, and all these things, you know, we talk early on, songwriting, painting, whatever. You always have a thousand ideas that you haven't got to yet. Were you coming up and just going through, reading the news, talking to people, getting ideas for articles and kind of back keeping track and just getting to as you could knock them out or was the editor throwing them at you or.

No, no, it was generated by me mostly. I spend a lot of time you're talking about having solid advice. And one of those pieces of advice is I networked like crazy. Like I wanted to meet everybody, talk to people. I talked to everybody. And it wasn't necessarily like, I'm talking to you for a purpose, because I haven't. I just wanted to hear what people were working on, their ideas, what they were thinking, and I would. So was that an extension of why.

You wanted to write?

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the big things that I heard early on for my cousin that kind of has kept me moving is follow your natural curiosity. And it sounds like you have followed a trail that has been motivated by your curiosity about maybe was triggered to the technology side. Growing up in a town where you had IBM kind of dominating everybody's thinking and the air you breathe and probably at least one or two stories on the news every night. And so maybe cause you to lean over to that subject. But your natural curiosity about the people and the stories behind the scenes means rather than getting caught up in the nuts and bolts, sounds like that's where your interest always was really kind of started and pursued.

No, Absolutely. And in fact, one of the great things about journalism is it's a free pass to ask anybody anything you want to ask them. Right?

Yeah.

And so. And when you work for a high profile organization like USA Today, everybody wants to talk to you anyway because they know it's going to reach millions of people. So that led to me, I mean everybody you can name that's been a big player in technology for the last 30 years. I've interviewed, talked to, had relationships with.

Yeah.

And so that's actually been a very exciting part of what I've been doing actually just to a quick point is that I had so many stories about like just to tell. I have two grown kids and my daughter, my oldest also got into journalism. She works for a magazine in the uk and so at one point about a year ago or so, she said you should write some of these down. So like even just for me, like, I want to have them. And so I ended up pulling some of my old files. I saved every clip of every story I ever wrote.

Really.

I started pulling out some of my old files from the 80s and 90s and early 2000, whatever, and started a substack newsletter where each week I write like I pull some old story out about an interview with Bill Gates or something like that and write about my. What was going on at that time and try to draw some lessons out about that from that people could learn today. That's been actually great fun. It's like both getting a chance to reminisce, but also like put it in the context of what's going on now.

Right. Because the principles don't change, you know, the fundamentals, the principles of strategy. If you're a chess grandmaster now, you're probably following a lot of time tested strategies that have always been in there. I'm talking out of school because I don't anything about.

So you could be saying anything but.

You know, like songwriting, you know, all of these things, the fundamentals seem to stay the same. It's a matter of how you can combine them and put them out there in the public. And so having that data, that's probably like buried treasure for you to get back in There. I'll tell you one thing. You probably found. You probably found you were smarter back then than you realized you were at the time because of the things you wrote down. You didn't even really understood what you were writing at the time. If you had that experience.

I had the other. Some of that. Yeah. I was like, oh, wow, how did I do that?

Right. And so revisiting that, a great. What a great thing to do. But the thing that is so helpful is to. I don't know if you have experienced this, but people will. You'll make a point, you'll tell a story, and there'll be a big point in there and it'll go right over most people's heads, you know, because you're familiar with it, you know what's behind it. And all you'll think, man, this is going to be bullseye. But it'll. Most of the time it goes right over their head. And so it really is helpful. I found it's really helpful to help go through that stuff again. Like you said, pull out the truths or pull out the fundamentals from some of these old articles, you know, telling the stories, but help people understand. Here's how you. Because it's one thing to know a fundamentalist, another thing, how to apply it. And people get lots. That's the great thing about stories. You could hear all of the unlimited ways people have used these fundamentals to accomplish things and that maybe they never thought about before. And so that's what's so good about writing these things. Publicizing, explaining and backing it up with a interesting story kind of keeps people engaged so they can stay with you long enough to get the point. So how do you unravel these, you know, what's in your mind when you're out? Because obviously you hit a nerve with the way you wrote the book. Let's just stay with the slightly bigger, bigger book. I've got other questions about that USA Today experience, but what was your intent? How did you picture it in your mind that you were going to be communicating these concepts that are really revolutionary type concepts when people read it and then they want to change their company, changed themselves, and then it turned into them calling you up and say, help us do it. But what was in your mind? Because you obviously had a good idea about how to communicate that stuff.

Well, here's what happened. So. So I wrote it. As you can see, the book cover is with three other guys. All three of them had been technology company founders or CEOs or investors in some ways. And then they had later in their careers started advising startups and basically they had a few concepts. One of the basic ones, and I'd known a couple of these guys for a long time and we were talking about this over dinner one night and by this point in time too, I had been writing about tech for ages. And I knew like all, you know, I knew the trends, I knew things were, how things were working. So they had this one observation that was that in most markets today, it's always been true to some extent, but it's particularly now in Digital markets like SaaS software for instance, or apps that they can on the web that almost always it's a winner take all market category. You get an Uber that takes like the 75% of the share of the ride, sharing on demand transportation category, Lyft taking 20% and a bunch of hangers on with a little bit else. And that plays itself out over and over. In fact, there's been research by economists that have showed that this is the case. And so then if you actually think about that for a second logically and you think, well, if you're running a company or starting a company, why wouldn't you want to do everything in your power to be the one that wins a market category? If the one who wins the market category is going to take 75% of the economics of the category?

Correct.

So then if that's the case, can we study companies that have done this and look at other research that others have done and try to reverse engineer how to do that? How do you see a new market category in the first place once you see it, how do you set its rules and claim it so that people think that you're the one that's going to own it? And how do you roll that out to the market so that people start to believe you're going to be the winner of this category and really kind of carry that momentum throughout the years. So the process of writing the book was actually a process of really thinking all that through and doing this reverse engineering of all this. And there was no phrase called category design at that time. But there was actually one day that the four of us were, we always got together at of the author's houses in Santa Cruz and spent a few days like, you know, just hammering out ideas once a month. And we were just talking this through about halfway through the book, but we were like, what is this thing called that we're writing about?

And what.

Al Ramadan is one of the co authors, had a long stint at the top of Macromedia and Macromedia had created this idea called Experience Design, which since has become a thing. Like there's, you know, thousands of experienced designers out there in the technology world.

And.

And he was talking about. Al was sitting there going like this sounds like it feels a lot like a, like a discipline, like Experience Design was when we created it back then. And I don't know, I can't remember. They credit me with piping up and saying, but it's about categories. It's category design. And everybody's like, yes, that's it. So we gave it a name, Category Design. And it really is. It's about how to identify and then define and hopefully win a market category over time. And. And that's what the book is about. And it's kind of a playbook for doing that. So the whole process of talking all this through is how we kind of came to all these concepts. And then I'm the writer of the group. So I was the one who was going home after these big discussions, putting it down on, you had to go.

To work after the great and whatever it was.

12, 14 months later, we had a book.

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