FI Alumni Master Session: An Introduction to Category Design with Mike Damphousse and Kevin Maney

All right, and we're live. Welcome everybody to this edition of this, uh, month's Alumni Master Session. My name is Mike Super Vici, for those of you that don't know me, and I run the Alumni Success Group here at the Founder Institute. And our role is to help you grow in any way that we can. Uh, sometimes we do that through structured programs like Funding Lab, Product Market Fit Lab, and so on. Other times we do it through one-on-one advice, and other times we do it through these alumni master sessions, which we do every single, you know, month, where we bring in an expert to talk to us about a very, very important topic. Before we get started, just a few housekeeping items. If you see there on your right-hand side, there's a chat room. If this is your first time attending one of these master sessions, what we want to do with these is that we want to make them highly interactive because they're for you. We bring in an expert and we want you to ask questions. If there's any questions that come up either during the talk or after the talk, please feel free to add them in the chat room. What I will do is I will make sure that I relay all those questions over over to Kevin, and then, you know, we can go ahead and go from there. That being said, it's my pleasure to introduce Kevin, who is— will tell you a lot, a lot about how to basically become a category leader, how to think about all this, and, you know, I would love to just turn it over to you at this point, Kevin. Maybe you can introduce yourself, and then we can get started with the presentation.

Sure. Yeah, appreciate that, Mike, and hi everyone. Yeah, I'm Kevin Maney. It's possible that some of you have run into my work before. I'm a journalist and author, or have been for 25, 30 years in this technology space for USA Today and Fortune and Wired and pretty much anybody, Newsweek, everybody else you could think of, and I've written a bunch of books. And what we're going to talk about today is what came out of a book that came out in 2016 called Play Bigger. In which we proposed and wrote about this idea of category design. And what's happened in my career since then is the book came out and it's been such a hot commodity around the tech startup world that it's turned into a business for me. Actually, most of what I do now is go around advising companies based on what we wrote in the book. So I guess the idea today is to tell you the basics about what that's all about.

That's great.

Let's get going, Mike.

That's great. And it looks like I see Mike Damphouse as well. He's also just joining us live as well. Mike also works with Kevin on this, which is great. Hey, Mike.

Hey, guys. Sorry about the delay. I had technical difficulties.

No problem.

We're just introducing ourselves anyway. So it's actually your turn. So if you want to go ahead and introduce yourself as well, it would be great for the audience here.

Yeah, I'm Mike Damphaus, one of the partners at Category Design Advisors. I've got probably, I don't know, 20, 30 years of CEO, CMO track record with some hits and some misses. And I've been part of the Play Bigger family since about, I don't know, 1999 when I hired Dave Peterson, one of the co-authors, to be to head up my marketing team when I had a startup back in the '90s. And then when the book came out, Dave called and said, hey, Damp, can you partner with, with Kevin and put together something on the East Coast? So that's kind of what we did. And right now, the East Coast, West Coast thing doesn't even matter. We've been all over the world. We're doing projects from Israel to Singapore and all over the US.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the introduction. Everyone, before Kevin gets started, I've already started posting some things in the chat room. If you have questions, say hello, whatever, add them into the chat room on your right. We're going to be relaying these questions over to Kevin and to Mike as the presentation is going on. So, Kevin, I'll let you take it from here.

All right.

So let me get the screen share on.

Yep, we see your screen.

Excellent. Right, I'm gonna go back there.

And then you wanna just go ahead and make it full screen and then we should be ready to go.

Yep.

Very nice, we're in.

Excellent. We're in but we don't have Kevin. But we'll have to live without Kevin today. Alright, so everybody, sorry for the technical difficulties, but if you were here since the top of the hour, you'll know that Kevin Maney, who is one of the co-authors of Play Bigger, is logged in but is having some technical difficulties. So I'm Mike Dampfhaus, I'm Kevin's partner, and we're gonna talk today about category design, and hopefully bring Founders Institute some value. So what do we mean by the word category? Basically, category is about innovation in certain contexts and finding what's missing. If you look back in history, there have been category designers since marketing had started, since companies had started, since people were trying to go to market. One of the best examples, and it's in the book, is Clarence Birdseye. Clarence Birdseye was studying wildlife in the Arctic when he found that he saw the locals, the Inuits catching fish out of the ocean and throwing them on the ice. And it was so cold that the fish were flash freezing. And they would then take the fish and stack them like logs. And what he realized was that they were solving a problem of not being able to fish all winter by flash freezing fish and being able to have fish throughout the winter. And he thought, could I build a system to do this with food in the US? He was from New York. So he came up with the idea and started experimenting with flash-freezing vegetables. And he realized that the problem that we all had that we didn't know we had which was if you wanted vegetables in the winter, you had to eat them out of a canning jar, was basically could be solved with a frozen foods industry. So he created the freezers, he created the whole ecosystem, the trucks that delivered frozen food from the factory to the stores. He created the freezer displays for the stores. So Clarence Birdseye saw a problem, identified that problem and realized that if he could solve it, he would have a new category of business, which today is frozen foods. So how do categories work? This is a book by Paul Garofsky, who studied markets and how they evolve. He was an economist. And essentially, he defined, decided that, or, found that most categories are set up in a way where they start to define themselves as a natural life cycle. And as the categories start to define themselves, there are multiple vendors that emerge. Somebody comes up with the idea, there are a handful of copycats, and the market starts to define itself. As it starts to mature, Over time, the market starts to become developed, the vendors start to drop off, and a leader or a handful of leaders, but typically a large leader starts to take hold. That category, once it's defined, is a chosen category that people now start to see. The market then starts to grow in value. And as the market grows in value, that category starts to take effect. It's in the develop phase. And then when it finally reaches a point of being a dominant category, it's in the dominate phase. That dominant design chosen is in the beginning evolving into that market cap area. And together you'll start to see the market cap takes off and the number of vendors drops off. So why do categories work that way? It comes down to brain science. Basically, between brain science and computer science, the book Two Second Advantage, it's a great book, you should pick it up if you can, talks about cognitive biases. And cognitive biases are how we make decisions and how we store things. So we love categories. Our brains are full of lots of information. All day long, we're surrounded by activities. We pick up new information. We need to store that information. We store things in categories. As you see here, this is a frozen food aisle. The frozen food aisle is easy. When I walk into a store, I walk in saying, "I need frozen peas." I don't walk in thinking I want Bird's Eye frozen peas. I walk in thinking frozen peas, and I walk to the frozen food aisle. I find the door or doors that have peas behind it, and I see the generic ones and I probably see the Birdseye ones. And the way my brain is functioning, I've got a bias towards Birdseye because it's the first brand that I associated with frozen foods. Categories are also line items on budgets. If you can create a category that becomes a line item on a budget, then you've certainly made yourself a category king. Because people think in large buckets. People want to put storage, put their, people want to put their thoughts in storage in areas that are easy to get to. Steve Jobs, he used one of the classic cognitive biases called the anchoring effect. Anchoring effect is when something first comes to you and it's the first time you've heard it, you anchor that in position. So when I first heard of a smartphone, still remember this, it was, I think, 2007 or '08. I was out at a buddy's in California and he said, hey, look, I just got the iPhone. That was an anchoring effect. It was the first time I heard of it. Then you've got groupthink. Cognitive bias of groupthink is that all my friends started to buy iPhones. And I said, damn, I wanna get myself an iPhone. So that created more cognitive bias for the category. And then choice supportive. I've bought Macs and iPhones for I don't know how long now. And today I am an Apple junkie. And so the smartphone established that category of smartphones. My friends influenced me to buy it. I wanted to be like them. And then now I think I've had every iPhone model that's come out except for one, maybe the 6 I skipped. But Steve Jobs created the category, established it, and I will, probably continue buying Apple iPhones as long as I can imagine. So category design is a way to take advantage of the way our brains work. You look for what's missing. Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5R Energy, he had a really interesting thing. He saw that People don't want necessarily to have a drink when they need energy, they just need energy. So he came up with the Energy Shot, and the Energy Shot was a flavored, one mouthful, drop it down boost of energy and vitamins that he realized, I don't wanna sell this in the drink category, I don't wanna be in the coolers, I wanna be out by the cash register in a little shot bottle. And so he came up with the energy shot, and today it's a $5 billion category. But you wanna think different, not just better. Don't think like a product designer, don't think like a spec sheet. If you wanna say I'm shinier, brighter, and faster, you're probably saying the wrong things. Lee Iacocca. Now this goes back, back almost 30 years now, but he realized that families need more than just a station wagon. Families need something bigger, they need something more comfortable, something they can walk in and out of instead of crunching to get in, something that they can put groceries in and the kids. But he also needed something that wasn't as big as a van because it wouldn't fit into garages the way houses were built. So they came up with the minivan and they introduced the minivan under multiple brands. There was the Plymouth Voyager, there was the Dodge Caravan, and essentially it's not the brand that introduced the category. It was Lee Iacocca calling it the minivan. And telling people why they had a problem, a problem they didn't know they had, and solving it. So you show us that problem that we didn't know we had or didn't think we could solve, and that's a category. Here's a client we worked on recently, a company called Ripples. They're in Israel. What they decided one day, it was interesting, the two founders were sitting there looking at a coffee, and one of them who's a product designer was looking at that coffee and said, everyone looks at their coffee when they get it, they look at the foam. What if there was a message there, something we could take advantage of? And we came up with the category Bev Talk Media. Basically, the problem is that you had a gap. There was this coffee being presented to you with foam and everyone looks. Same thing with the Guinness beer. You're handed the beer, there's this beautiful layer of foam on it. What if we could take advantage of that? And we took advantage of that by, they created a printer that prints on top of foam top drinks. So their category, BevTop Media, is solving the naked drink gap. If you see a problem in VCs, we coined this from, took this from VC friends of ours. If you see a problem that no one knows they have, that's the very best kind. It's a $0 billion market. If nobody's already charging after it, and you see that there's potential, it's a $0 billion market. It's a problem that nobody knew they had that you can solve. Here's a picture of Kevin with Jeff Bezos. Kevin was at a conference and Amazon was about to launch what we all know today as Amazon Web Services. And Jeff reached out to Kevin and said, hey, could you meet me in my hotel room? I want to discuss something. And basically Kevin went up there and Jeff said, we're about to launch this thing. The, and I can't remember the exact term it was called, but the something elastic cloud. And Kevin, you know, his eyes went up and Jeff said, I need to describe it in a way that's much clearer than the way I'm describing it. And Kevin basically, having known him for years, started talking to him and listening. And he, you know, listened to identify the problem and then tried to come up with a very simple way to describe it. And together they put together a new point of view of how to talk about the product And they realized that it was web services, which we know today. And Amazon Web Services is simple enough, it's a category. And now cloud computing is definitely a category that Amazon is now dominating. If you see a problem and you think it's a category, think about what we call the adjacent possible. This is a concept that came from Steve Johnson's book, "Where Good Ideas Come From." Essentially, the adjacent possible, if you look at this chart, on one side we have technology, on the other, we've got society and what society's willing to accept. If you think about the television, it's in the green section. Society's totally willing to accept that. My parents, 79 years old, they know how to use a television. As you approach that white barrier, you start to get to the point on the other side where ideas become technologically advanced, but society has not quite embraced it yet. Right over that line, like for instance, virtual reality, that is a new category. That's something that's emerged, that you've identified that people are ready to embrace but not quite there yet, it's your job to create the category and cause them to embrace it. Teleportation, way off on the right, too far away. Society won't embrace it, not yet. If you launch the teleportation category today, everybody would just look at it and they wouldn't start to invest their consumer dollars in it. And it probably wouldn't take hold as a category. But virtual reality today, that's something people can see, they're willing to take hold. So category design is a whole company strategy based on how our brains work. Remember the cognitive biases. Every category today, or every company today, always has a product. They got a great product idea, they've defined it, they've developed it, and they build a good company. They design their company culture, they have healthy snacks in the break room, they have book club, whatever it may be. But product design and company design alone doesn't stand unless you've got a category strategy. And category kings, when they come into the market with all three of those, That category strategy is the foundation of how they bring that product and their company to market. So the impact of winning a category. Market share. Category kings take market share. The study that we did that shows this shows that 75% of category economics will be taken by the company that first launched, introduced, and, and educated the category. You can measure it by total market usage— Dropbox versus Google Drive. You can also measure a category king or identify a category king because of how people want to work there. There's a study that was being done by Suzy Welch, who's the wife of Jack Welch, the ex-CEO of General Electric. Jack was actually given a copy of the book "Play Bigger" by Jeff Bezos, and Jack gave it to his wife Suzy, who's a journalist, and she was doing a study with LinkedIn to be presented on CNBC. About how people are attracted to work at certain companies. And she had just read the book and she starts doing this study with Dan Roth and realizes that most of, most of the companies that were the most attractive companies to work for were category kings. So she reached out to Al Ramadan, one of the co-authors, and wanted to talk to him about it. And together they realized that, yeah, when you're category king, you're a more attractive company to work for and it attracts talent, which we all know today is a challenge. So some of the companies we worked with, everywhere from TaskRabbit, consumer companies, Ripples, the company that printed on the coffee foam, Techstars is an incubator like you guys, like Founders Institute. Most of these companies, many are tech-based, but both consumer and B2B. So with that quick overview of category design, and now we can turn towards questions. And I don't know if Kevin is back on yet or if he is still technologically shut off there.

I think he's not gonna— he's not on the webinar, but that's okay because we wanted to ensure that we have plenty of time to go and cover some questions here. So everyone in the chat room, this is a really good opportunity for you to kind of ask questions about this and how to think about category design. So maybe I can start. So You know, at what point should founders start thinking about category design in their business process?

Well, many people think that, you know, you really have to have your business baked and your product baked to jump into category design, but the real answer is you should start thinking about it from day one. The reason for that, if you remember the triangle, product design, company design, and category design, if you build your category strategy into your company from day one, then you're gonna have it in all aspects of the business. You're gonna have it in category thinking as the developers are writing code, category thinking when marketers of putting messages together. Category thinking when you're recruiting people. You know, we have a client, they have their recruits always read Play Bigger before their first interview, and they do it because they want people to come in and be, you know, basically, you know, joining the club in a way that they all have the same shared goals. So Don't think that you're too early and do it, you know, if you have a category that could be had, start to think about category strategy early and often.

Meul has a really good question here in the chat room. Hey Meul, can a company become a category king without funding?

Certainly. Funding is important, but funding is not everything. And you know, it's easy to say that when I'm not struggling to launch a company, but you know, I've been there. And if you can put together your strategy and get it to market and do it in a way that's category-oriented, meaning market the problem, market the ramifications of not solving the problem, and introduce your category as the solution to that problem. That's category thinking. And if you can do that, you can do it in an intimate, low-budget way. I'll give you an example. There's a company that worked with the guys at Play Bigger, the other co-authors of the book. There's a company that was targeting the shipping industry. The container shipping on boats. You see those big containers. And think about that industry for a minute. There's a lot of ships in the world, but they're really controlled by a handful of shipping companies. And so they were basically trying to figure out how do we do a lightning strike or a launch to that market in a way that can capture those handful of shipping companies. So instead of spending millions of dollars and Wall Street Journal ads and trade show takeovers, they did an intimate lunch, discussion and lunch, at an event where all these shipping companies were already there. So they got the invites to the right people, They had those companies in a room, they did an educated luncheon, and they had buyers. So don't think you need to spend millions of dollars to bring a category to market. You can do it in very simple ways.

Carolyn asked, well, it's more like a statement asking for your advice here. It's a tricky balance, you know, what people know equals easy to get started. With, you know, totally new category that no one's heard of equals really difficult but can dominate. Any advice there?

It's funny, categories don't have to be simple. They don't have to be complex. Categories just simply have to be a container that your solution is solving for people. The container is where the problem exists. Right? It's a hole, it's a nagging pain. The solution is the category. And the category should be what I kind of call it a universal truth. A universal truth is you look outside and there's a blue sky and you say to somebody, that's a blue sky. Nobody can argue with that. If you look at something and say, that's a category, like customer relationship management, Yeah, that's a category. Everybody needs to store data on their customers and track the relationship. It's a universal truth. So whether it's complex or simple, that ripples, right? Printing on top of drinks and putting ads on the foam of your Guinness. Now that you see it, you realize that that's an opportunity, right? Problems can present opportunity. And so it's very simple. Let's print on top of a drink. But it's a category that's taken off in a crazy way.

Isabel asked the question, can you tell us a little bit more about the lightning strike?

Yes, once you have defined your category and you've defined what we call a point of view. A point of view is The way you tell your story, and it's done in an emotional way. It's typically when we produce points of view for people, it's 600 to 800 words. It's written to a story like you're talking to your most common, most important persona. And you tell the story in a way that's emotional. You start with the problem. You illustrate the pain of not solving the problem, and you're going for the gut. And when you go for the gut, and then you turn around and embrace them with the solution and the category, then you're starting to appeal to the logic. And you tell the story of your category in a way that doesn't talk about your brand or your category in specifications or shinier, brighter. You're talking about it in really emotional, wholesome ways. But when you do that, you now have a different way to talk to the market. And that's where lightning strikes come in. What a lightning strike is, is when you've defined your category and you need to now bring it to the world, you need to do it two ways, both internally in your own company and ecosystem. And you can do that through all sorts of ways, you know, Hey, we're launching this new product, you know, next month. Everyone, we've got t-shirts, we've got, you know, speakers, whatever you do internally to ramp up and prepare for the category launch, what we call lightning strike. And the lightning strike when we go public is it's that one moment in time where you concentrate all your energies on the category message. And what you're really doing is you're trying to deliver that point of view in multiple ways. Could be simple ways like a billboard sign or in the case of TaskRabbit last year, they took over all the subway posters. They had TaskRabbit posters everywhere. It could be in a simple way. We had a client that launched at HR Tech a couple years ago and they just did the coffee sponsorship. It's the cheapest sponsorship available at a large event, but everybody walking around the event had a coffee cup in their hand that had their category on it, time intelligence. So lightning strikes are meant to be compelling. They don't have to be big budget like we talked about earlier. You know, they don't have to be Wall Street Journal and hijack a trade show. They could be the intimate dinner or lunch. It could be as simple as, we had a client this week that did a strike, it was as simple as a press release. I think it was, you know, $1,200 on PR Newswire. They got picked up by 10 earned media placements. And I think 800, I think, actual unearned media pickups where, you know, they just read, media sites reprint your press release. So it can be that simple. But lightning strikes should have a purpose. Make sure that your purpose is understood. If your purpose is to introduce the category, then introduce the category. Don't talk about how many bits and bytes your software saves you. Talk about the problem and the solution. If you're introducing a new partnership to your ecosystem, talk about why the ecosystem had a problem. Always focus on the problem and then talk about how your category solves it.

Tori from Endiotix is asking a question here. So we're trying to create the category of a tiny pill robot surgeons in the human body to have a passing resemblance to a passive pill cam, but To us, we see a massive new market as we change the nature of surgical intervention. What might be some good strategies to show people the big opportunity without getting pigeonholed?

That's a big question. I think, I think that comes down to, or comes back to the discussion on point of view. Getting your story to a point where you can talk about, and I don't know your technologies or the terminology in your industry well enough to articulate this, but to be able to tell the story of these, and I'll just call them surgical bots, I don't know what you call them, but to be able to tell that story in a way that you can convey in 600 words, you know, a 3-minute story. People call them elevator pitches. I don't know about you, but I've never given my story in an elevator. Think of it as a bar stool story, right? If you're sitting there and you ordered a drink and the person next to you is working on their computer and drinking a beer, and you look over and you saw something that you could address, like they had a slide up that was, and this is, I know this would never occur with surgical microbots, whatever they are, but you look over and you say, hey, let me tell you what I do that could solve that problem. And you talk in a way like you have a martini in your hand. That's the story you wanna talk with. Keep it simple. Start with the problem. Acknowledge that you know the person's problem, your persona. Once you can identify and articulate the problem and get people to acknowledge their problem, then talk about the solution. And the solution is your category. And in the case of, and again, not knowing the terminology, you know, microsurgical bots, there's your category. You introduce it and then you start talking about it and what it does for people. What does it solve for them? And that's what a point of view does. And I think, Simplifying your story to be at that bar stool level is what makes it easy to digest.

Jerome asked a question, how to communicate basically around, maybe I'm gonna have to elaborate on this Jerome, 'cause it's a little unclear. So, you know, can you talk about some best practices on how to communicate and get funding for a new category? He says it sounds extra difficult and to, you know, get metrics about like something new, you know, serviceable addressable market, total addressable market, you know, any advice on how to best, how to educate people on this?

Yeah, actually investors love new categories. So don't shy away from it. Think of it as, in fact, If you're presenting your new business ideas to investors and you're comparing yourselves to other markets, they're probably thinking, ah, they're just coming up with a bigger, better, brighter. If you present your idea as a totally new category, remember the $0 billion market? In your question, you asked about TAM, right? What's the total addressable market? Put a slide up that has a dollar sign, a zero, and a B. Zero billion dollar market. Tell that story to your investors. Tell them that, yeah, there might be 5 other companies doing this, this, and that, but this is a new category. This is a new way to do it. This category doesn't exist right now. So they say, what's the total addressable market? You say, it doesn't exist right now. It's a zero billion dollar market. It's unlimited. If we create the market, they will come. So don't be afraid to introduce new categories. In fact, I know one of the good VCs, friends of the Play Bigger team out in California, when he hears a pitch and people don't even think category design, but if he hears a pitch and they say something like, it's new or this is different or nobody else is doing this, It's a category and he puts it right in the category bucket and he invests in category winners.

Carolyn asks about time intelligence. Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah, so Replicon, a client of ours, was kind of interesting, 12-year-old company, I think, when we first started working with them. And they were, they created or were selling basically time tracking software, kind of a, you know, old school industry, you know, where who checks in to work at what time, what project did they work on at what time, you know, competing with time clocks and other software applications. But what they did is they started to add analytical tools to the time tracking software and applied some machine learning and realized that there is so much value that time brings to a business and that businesses weren't trying to address. You know, a company's biggest asset is their people, and the people are spending time all day doing things. So they introduced the category time intelligence, which starts to treat time as an asset. And they launched that category at HR Tech a couple years ago. That was the coffee cup sponsorship. And it was very successful to the point where, and this is something you wanna always look out for, an analyst was talking to them and said, you know, everything at the show is exciting this year. There's a bunch of new things, but There's something about this time intelligence where I actually feel like I understand what it is you're solving for me. And when you can get an analyst to use the word feel and identify a problem and then use your language, when an analyst starts to use the category name, you know you're on the right path. So time intelligence is that, and they're competing today in a billion-dollar market and people look at it as something fresh and new.

Another question here from Ricardo. Hey, Ricardo. So again, along the same concept, you know, what is the best way to introduce a category that investors, users are not familiar with? For example, our startup Paid Exposure is building a marketplace that empowers anyone to get paid for promoting, for promoting sponsors, looking for any kind of online/offline exposure. We tend to associate ourselves in the influencer category because that's the familiar popular term. Do we develop an exposure category? Uh, question mark. We're attempting to do that by referring to influencers as promoters. What would you suggest?

It's a very common, really good question. It's a very common situation for a lot of our clients. And you know, you end up in situations where you have master categories and subcategories, or you have a category point of view to talk to one persona, and a category point of view that talks to another persona. And it's very common, so you just need to try to deal with it. If you've got multiple personas that have truly different problems that you're solving, but you're solving with the same category, then talk differently to them. When you put your main point of view together, and think of your point of view as it's the CEO's TED Talk, right? It's the 3 to 4 minutes of here's the story of who we are. Put together your main point of view, talk to your biggest persona. And when I say biggest, I mean who's gonna write the check to buy your software, whatever it may be. You know, the most obvious persona is the CEO. CEO of, you know, companies of XYZ size. That's your persona, talk to them. But if you have sub-personas, maybe it's the head of their HR department, maybe it's the CFO within the company, then talk different points of view, create sub-stories. And, you know, as far as the categories are concerned, you wanna try to keep the categories together so that you have one category that people associate you with. But it's okay to introduce some other, if you wanna call it subcategories, things that can resonate better with the HR department, for instance, as opposed to the CFO. I don't know if that answered it, but it's a very, that's a very deep dive discussion that typically takes place and it could be a whole day deep dive. I've seen it happen.

Um, sorry if I, I mispronounced your name here, is asking, you know, can you speak a bit more about mapping the ecosystem, um, a blueprint, uh, and any strategies for bringing in some of these ecosystem players to help validate the category or your story?

Yeah, and very good question. You hit on one of the top benefits of an ecosystem, so An ecosystem can validate your category. And if you design it right, it's gonna be there to support you on day one. So let's say that you've got an offering that has integrated partners. So maybe you've got an app that interfaces through an API to Google Maps. I don't know, something simple. Your ecosystem is now your app. It's the people that use your app, and there's the Google Maps interface to, to your app. So your ecosystem is involving multiple things. If you can do that, especially with ecosystem partners that can bring value to you, it totally endorses your category. So ecosystem partners are not only there to help enable you solve the problem, but they can enable you to validate the problem as well, or the category. An ecosystem doesn't have to be as complex as, you know, formal relationships with companies. It could be the ecosystem of, you know, think of Uber. The ecosystem is drivers. The ecosystem is people that need rides. The ecosystem is restaurants that wanna deliver their food. The ecosystem is unfortunately the taxi drivers that are giving away their business. So that whole ecosystem is very complex, but it's also very simple when you map it out. He mentioned also blueprint. Some people think ecosystem and blueprint kind of blend together, and they can. But your blueprint, when you think of a category blueprint, think of it as sort of the whiteboard description, visual description of what your category is. So think of it as, you know, a map or a diagram, a flow, something that can visually articulate the category, the problem you're solving and what the category is and how it solves. And if you can do it in a visual manner, that's the blueprint. The book has a couple examples on it. "Play Bigger" has a couple examples of blueprints in it.

There's a question here in the chat room from Dustin. Is there a way that entrepreneurs in an emerging field, for example, chatbots that use natural language, AI learning, can best think about their role in this new category's lifecycle?

Certainly, I mean, you know, everybody, everyone's role, if you're creating a category, everyone in your company should be considered a category designer. Get everyone in your company to read the book, "Play Bigger." And I don't mean that lightly. I don't know, we did just this week, company that just raised, I think, about $100 million in like an E or F round. They have a book club and they decided, the CEO had read "Play Bigger" and thought, "Yeah, this is awesome. I want my whole company to think like this." So he bought the book for all, I think it was 120 employees, and everybody read the book. And then they had a book club on Wednesday and Kevin was there. And what's interesting is that every person in that company, and it's a large company, they advertise on television, you see them on your Facebook feed everywhere. I can't disclose who they are, but my point is that everyone in that company had a role, whether it's the person writing the marketing copy, to the product designer that's thinking, you know, how am I solving someone's problem in a different manner? Or if it was the salesperson, how they're talking to people. Everyone had a role from the CEO downward. So I don't know if that addresses the question, but, you know, bringing a category to market, it takes a village.

Question here from Judy. We are in a category that isn't well known yet, executive social, in quotes. How can we publicize the category? Or any advice or thoughts on that?

Yeah, so that's obviously an open-ended question with a million answers. How do you publicize it? You know, it comes down to, you know, the typical question of we have this great thing, we wanna go, you know, introduce it and dominate the market. Well, think about what it is you're trying to actually achieve. The cognitive bias issues, in the book we talk about there's 3 cognitive biases that really impact category thinking. And if you think about which one you wanna dial up for the purpose of what you're trying to do, it can influence the ideas that you might come up with for a strike. So idea, you said executive social, I think was the category in air quotes. You said that most people don't know it exists yet. So what is it you wanna do? You want to, introduce it to people so that everyone knows it exists, or do you wanna get it to some influencers to get them to adopt it and maybe start to influence others that it exists? You make those decisions and you say, okay, one is a mass market lightning strike, right? You'd have to get to tens of thousands of executives to go one way. So that's broad awareness. But the other one, which is thought leadership awareness, might only require dominating a conference of CEOs that's taking place in the next month. And you've got 100 CEOs that get together once a year. I'm thinking like one of those events where there's CEO thought leadership. You hijack it, you get 100 people to know who you are, and those 100 people are thought leaders. And get them to influence. So don't always restrict your go-to-market thinking based on budget or magnitude. Think creatively. What is it you're trying to achieve? If you were truly trying to get people to, you know, tens of thousands of people to adopt your idea and understand your category, that's gonna be a heck of a lot bigger thinking and budget execution than it would be if you're simply trying to get 100 people in a room to know you exist.

So we're getting close to the top of the hour, everyone here. So please add your final question. We're trying to get to as many of them as we can here in the next few minutes. Luciano asks a question back to the ecosystem question. So we're an early-stage startup in the aviation travel industry building ways for lines. It's an app. The market is very fragmented and we're considering proposing with many other startups to launch aviation travel startup ecosystem where we agree to co-market each other. What are your thoughts on doing this as a category builder?

Yeah, co-marketing or taking a whole ecosystem to a category together is great thinking. If you get— when you build a category, for instance, when we work on a category project, there's always someone in the room that says, throw a trademark symbol on that category name. Well, that's the last thing you wanna do. You wanna get everybody talking your category. You want people using it like it's a thing. You know, you don't want people looking at it as a brand. You want it to be everybody's. It's a gift to the world. Your category name should be utilitarian. People wanna use it. So you never throw a trademark symbol on it. And as soon as you can get others to start talking about it, as she said, in the ecosystem, your partners, get other people co-marketing and using that same term, that's the winner right there. Get people to use it.

To define their new categories, do you recommend that entrepreneurs put much of their energy towards building their personal brand or personal domain authority versus defining the new category with thought leadership that only comes from within the business brand itself?

Yeah, if a category point of view is done properly and the category name is one that makes sense to that category and everyone in the company is living, breathing the category. And I mean that almost, and this is gonna sound crazy, but almost in a religious way. You want everybody beating their chest to the category drum. If you do that, then the personal, you know, your comment about the personal branding and that, that all is gonna start to take shape. And you know, where, you know, you look through a company and There's companies in New York City that still wear suits to work, believe it or not, in the financial industry. But if you go across the street to the software company, everyone there has jeans and t-shirts. Well, that's the culture they've built. And that culture is based on their point of view. And if the point of view within the company includes the category story, then everybody's blue jeans are gonna start to be oriented around the category. They're gonna be, you know, tight ankle-hugging blue jeans, for instance, and it supports the category. And using a crazy metaphor, but basically the point of view in the category should influence everybody's personal brand. But then everybody's personal brand is gonna be their own as well. So you wanna intertwine it into your culture.

Final question here as we reach the top of the hour. You know, this is for me. So, okay, we buy it. This is what we want to do. We're super pumped up about category design now. Everybody here in the chat room, everyone that's going to watch this on replay. You know, what's the one thing I should do this weekend to kind of get the ball rolling on this? Like, what's the one thing I should start with?

It's exactly what we do when we start a new project with a client. So I would tell everybody, the first thing to do, and I know a lot of you have already done it, is read "Play Bigger." Second thing to do is make sure that all of your team that's important to you, your inner core team, your co-founders, maybe a key investor, have them read "Play Bigger." Once you've done that and you've got category thinking embedded in your mind, Then ask yourself, and this is in the book so you can go dig it up, Dave's 3 questions. It's a very simple exercise. Excuse me. When we work on a project with a client, our very first day is actually talking about Dave's 3 questions almost the whole day. And Dave's 3 questions are, What is the problem you're solving? Make sure you understand that to the nth degree. If you solve this problem, what would the category be? And you should be able to identify the category. And then if you solve that, if you solve the problem with the category, how big can that category be? And that's an economic question. And those simple 3 questions, can provide you with a lot of thinking that'll lead you towards realizing a category exists. And then once you realize the category exists, then you can start doing the real work, which is what's the perfect name for the category? What's the perfect point of view to tell the story? And by the way, the category name might not come to you until you're done the point of view and you're already talking about it to people. And the category name might be changed by the people that you bring the story to. Don't let the category name get you bogged down. Make the point of view your highest priority. How do you identify the problem? How do you talk about the solution? And that's the category.

Amazing. That was terrific. And I'm already seeing some people in the chat room that are thankful for this. Mike, thank you so much for doing this for our community. This has been terrific. We've all learned a lot. This was a great discussion. This is some of the highest level of engagement we've had on one of these sessions. So, you know, this has been just great. So thank you so much for doing this. I really, really appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to speaking with you soon.

Yeah, thank you so much. And to all the audience, the contact info that's on the screen there, we have no problem chit-chatting about category, to topics at any time. So whether you're one founder in a basement or you're already up to 50 people, either way, reach out. Categories are what we do every day.

Perfect. Thank you so much. And with that, we're gonna adjourn here. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a good rest of your week and your weekend. Goodbye.