a single source, nothing corroborates it · contested
Take the category buyers already shop in
Buyers rule options out by label long before they compare anything, so the word you use for yourself decides which budget you land in. One route is to claim an established category and stand as the modern option inside it, which borrows the outcomes that category already sells. The other is to name a category of your own, which costs you an education budget but leaves nobody to be compared against.
Where this splits
Kogan argues against inventing a category and says to position inside one buyers already fund, while Dry credits Loom's growth to naming a new one.
2 claims against 1
Greg Kogan
Position inside a category buyers already fund
- 01Work out which outcomes make enterprise buyers willing to pay, then find the established category that already sells those outcomes and position as the innovative alternative within it.
- 02If your label makes buyers think of a free open-source tool, your sales calls will be spent justifying the price, so change the label rather than the pitch.
Name a new category and define its terms
Name the new category you are creating and describe yourself in its terms rather than the old category's.
What it returned
- $115M
Teleport stopped calling itself a modern SSH and positioned against Privileged Access Management incumbents: Centrify, with $115M of 2019 revenue, and Cyberark, with a $4.7B market cap. Revenue rose more than 600% within six months of the new messaging, and sales velocity increased too.
Describing Teleport as a modern SSH made VPs of Engineering and CTOs think of OpenSSH, and much of every demo went to explaining why to pay for it.
Loom moved from screen recorder to video messaging for work
Sources
- How Loom Created a CategoryHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · undated · dissenting
- No New CategoriesGreg Kogan · gkogan.co · Story: Teleport · 2020-08-07
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
More in copy
- Keep the personality that drives some people off7 unconnected
- Interview buyers and write the page in their sentences6 unconnected
- Re-aim one durable claim at today's worry5 unconnected
- Answer the predictable objection with a specific4 unconnected
- Say the thing only you could have said4 unconnected
- Tighten the headline until only your segment fits4 unconnected