BTW - Every Wednesday I take a hot take from LinkedIn and answer the pushback live.

This week's category creation post got a lot of heat, so I shared the dos and don'ts and took your questions.

If you're building a category, thinking about it, or wondering if you should, this one is for you.

Let's dig in.

Building a business is hard. Building a category is harder. You're taking on the job of educating a market that will also help your competitors, agencies, and partners.

Here are the four moves I've seen category leaders make, and the ones we made.

1. They don't sponsor events. They create their own.
Flip My Funnel drove the entire ABM category, grew to a 100,000+ person community, and competitors sponsored it.

2. They don't let analysts define them.
G2 was about to put Terminus in the advertising bucket. That would have capped us and our valuation. I fought them at every layer. Then I got our competitors together, wrote a manifesto, and went back with five companies and one ask: create a new category. They did.

3. They don't compete. They bring competitors together.
I asked competitors to sponsor an event called Flip My Funnel, on a different domain, with a keynote and a booth each. One rule: no product talk. They spent $10,000 each. It worked so well they did it again, five and six times.

4. They don't hire influencers. They become the influencer.
We wrote two books on ABM while building the category, including ABM Is B2B, Period. Nobody can sell you this as a package.

Symptom: you're running a standard go-to-market play and wondering why the category isn't moving.

Fix: stop following the advice written for companies that already have a category.

Mistake 1: we tried to host our own company event.
I reached out to 10 sponsors for a Terminus event. Every one said no. Why would they pay for our product? So I bought a domain for eight bucks, called it Flip My Funnel, and went back to the same people. They said yes.

Nobody will put money behind your product. They will put money behind the problem. We ran 15 to 20 events in two years, fully paid for.

Mistake 2: we tried to out-compete on brand with no budget.
We couldn't out-spend anyone. So we built an industry event instead. Customers, partners, competitors' customers, analysts, and media all showed up. When you have no money, you should have no shame.

Mistake 3: one marketer ran both Terminus and Flip My Funnel.
Guess which one dropped every time. The company always wins, because it pays the payroll. We put one person on the category full time.

Symptom: the category work keeps losing to the product work.

Fix: give it its own owner, its own budget, and its own brand.

1. We owned one phrase, and only that.
The $8 domain. Two books. A thousand podcast episodes. 20 to 30 events. A manifesto. A 100,000+ person community. We never said the word "Terminus" in any of it. The message was simple: less than 1% of leads become customers, so flip the funnel.

It wasn't a campaign or a stunt. We did it almost daily.

2. I changed my title.
Two years in, I went from co-founder and CMO to co-founder and Chief Evangelist. I dropped my direct reports and spent my time on the problem, everywhere.

3. We made it self-funding.
Within three years Flip My Funnel needed zero dollars from Terminus. And every customer we ever had had touched the Flip My Funnel brand: an event, a book, or the podcast.

Symptom: the category is a side project that finance keeps questioning.

Fix: pick one thing, go all in, and make it pay for itself.

"How do you find the gap?"
In 2014 and 2015, everyone was zigging toward the funnel: marketing automation, demand gen, lead gen. Forrester said less than 1% of leads become customers. Our gap wasn't a product. It was how people think about customers. We named it, and we owned the phrase. We also deliberately avoided "account-based advertising," even though that was our product. It was too narrow. "Account-based marketing" gave marketers a bigger idea.

"Is bringing competitors harder than competing with them?"
Maybe. But if you're hosting, everyone knows who's running the room. You get the attendee list first, so your team books meetings and coffees before the event. Everyone else tries to sell at a booth for one minute. That's the power of owning the microphone.

"What's the best lead gen for early-stage category creators?"
Wrong question. The moment you ask about lead gen, you've turned it into a product conversation. Ask: how do I find or create a tribe that believes in this problem? Without a tribe and problem-market fit, you'll never get product-market fit. Category creation is owning the problem-market phase.

"Before buyers choose your product, they need the language for it."
Exactly. Content, community, and founder conversations are go-to-market assets, not side marketing efforts. People don't form communities around products. They form them around problems.

"When do you drop the category idea?"
If you can't see yourself talking about it for the next decade, don't build one. Salesforce, HubSpot, Gainsight, and Terminus all had a founder still talking about the problem 10 to 20 years in. Fewer than a handful of B2B categories have been built in 30 years. Most companies do fine picking an existing category and being better, faster, or cheaper.

Go to runongtmos.com/move and take the free assessment. Over 5,000 companies have already run it. It'll show you the next step, not another motivational all-hands.

CEOs: if you want an operator to help you install the system, not a deck, check out the GTMarketplace.

Fractionals: 10+ years in GTM and want to become a Forward Deployment Operator? DM me on LinkedIn.

love,
sangram

p.s. 100,000+ GTM leaders read our content every day. If you want more frameworks like this, follow along at runongtmos.com and let's get moving.