Category Thinkers

In this episode, we chat with Rio Hodges, Principal at Antler. Rio encounters hundreds of startups each year through his firm's accelerator programs, so his perspective is invaluable if you’re in the early chapters of this journey.  We cover: The one crucial slide that many startups leave out of their pitch decks Why startups should obsess about the problem instead of the product How to right...

Scale Venture Partners’ Craig Rosenberg joins us on the show to talk about how category design drives demand, how he mentors founders, and a handful of stories from the startup and VC trenches. Craig is the Chief Platform Officer at Scale and long-time friend and collaborator of our co-host, Damp. In this episode, we'll discuss: Category design stories from Scale's portfolio. How Craig t...

Very rarely do we see such an explosion of innovation as we are seeing right now. The rise of AI reminds us very much of the early internet... just like the early dot-com era, AI will spawn a new generation of categories and subcategories. In this episode of Category Thinkers, we invited AI and machine learning expert Manny Bernabe to help us cover: New categories and subcategories that AI is maki...

You spoke and we heard you — this community needs a book club! We kicked off the first ever Category Thinkers Book Club with Eddie Yoon 's classic, Superconsumers. Listen to Eddie, the co-founders of Category Thinkers ( Mike Damphousse , John Rougeux , Pablo Gonzalez ), and members of the community discuss: Where Eddie came up with the insights that led to his book on Superconsumers How to ap...

Today, we have a special guest whose work has made a lasting impact in the realm of category design — Kipp Bodnar, the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot. 🛠️ About HubSpot: HubSpot isn't just a software company; it's a well-known category design success case with inbound marketing. By crafting a narrative around the inbound philosophy, HubSpot has succeeded in not just selling a product...

There's plenty of examples of founders, obsessed with a problem, applying category design to build their business and dominate their market. But realistically, most people that first encounter category design are not in the founding stages of their company.  That's why talking to the CEO of a publicly traded company that decided to apply category design to reinvent his company after 25 y...

You can read the books, and listen to all the podcasts about Category Design, but nothing beats learning from the experience of someone currently in the trenches of designing a new category. That's why we wanted to pull the curtain back on what it feels like to be actively designing a category as a startup founder/CEO with Hannah Grady Williams , Founder of d'Skills. After a TEDx Talk an...

Bill Macaitis is the former CMO then CRO of Slack, CMO of Zen Desk, and SVP of Marketing at SalesForce and in this conversation we dive deep into what made Slack the category king of team collaboration tools it has become. You'll notice that most of this story took place before Play Bigger was even written so this was intuitive category design by Bill and his team, and you'll have a chan...

Category Thinking is everywhere, and your ability to identify it in the wild will sharpen your skillset as a category designer. And in this episode of #CategoriesInTheWild, we'll examine WWE's development of the "sports entertainment" category. It's a perfect case study that every category designer should learn from. Join John Rougeux and Pablo Gonzalez in their conversati...

When founders first start considering a category strategy, they spend a lot of time bouncing ideas back and forth to develop a point of view. That can feel great or it can feel like a battle, but it's impossible to know if it's productive until they share it with someone else to see if it resonates. But how should the conversation go?  How do you know if you're making progress? How...

Mark Kilens has built a career as a marketing leader and category designer with HubSpot and Drift. Now, he's the CMO at Airmeet , the company behind Event-Led Growth. In this conversation, we break down what Mark's learned as a category designer, including: How to wrap your category in a familiar context to help buyers understand it. Mark's 3 step framework for developing category l...

When Apple launched the Vision Pro, it wasn't just a product launch, it was the launch of a new category called "spatial computing."  But did Apple get everything right?  They did a lot of things well, but we think Apple had a couple misses, too. Join us as we deconstruct Apple's newest category launch and discuss what we might have done differently. In this #CategoriesInTheWil...

One of the biggest reasons we knew the world needed the Category Thinkers Community (apart from our own desire to talk category strategy all day) is that there are many misconceptions about the discipline of category design, and who it's for. In fact, the term "category thinking", expands the tent on category design in a way that allows us to use it more freely in our efforts to cre...

The discipline of category design was formally launched seven years ago with the book, Play Bigger. If you were paying attention, it predicted what was coming – that in the next six to ten years, category design would tip into the mainstream. That’s why on category design’s seventh birthday, we decided to reunite three co-authors of Play Bigger ( Christopher Lochhead , Al Ramadan , Kevin Maney )....

This isn't just a podcast.   It's the launch of a community.   A  different community dedicated to the understanding and application of category design. Naturally, we're kicking it off with our POV. If you are a category designer looking for a band of pirates to be a part of... If you are category curious and looking to become category capable... If you know different beats better.....