The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten podcast.

In today’s episode of the Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about creating a new category as a startup.

Sometimes in order to stand out in a highly competitive niche, it may be necessary to create a new category for your product. This strategy is sometimes known as resegmenting and can be quite rewarding when done right, as you can then become a leader in the category you created.

In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what resegmenting is, if you should implement it for your startup, how Hubspot resegmented blogging, how Drift resegmented content marketing and much more.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:00 About today’s topic.

00:47 Why this topic was chosen.

02:01 If you should create a new category for your product.

02:19 How it’s much easier to be number one in the category you created.

02:51 How Hubspot resegmented blogging.

03:50 How Drift resegmented content marketing.

05:07 If resegmenting is something you should do for your startup.

06:20 The important thing to consider if you’re thinking about resegmenting.

07:42 How resegmenting isn’t necessary if you’re competing with everybody.

08:29 How you need to describe what you do when you’re creating a new market.

09:42 How companies that are successful at resegmenting do it.

3 Key Points:

It’s much easier to be number one in the category you created.

Hubspot resegmented blogging.

If customers are drawn to your resegmented product then it’s worth it.

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah and in a rare turn of events today we're going to talk about something that was inspired by a book. This book is called Play Bigger and the book is about what people are calling category design. This is the idea in business, in a company, in a startup, you can have the ablility to create a category.

[0:00:27]

Steli Efti: There's a lot of value in creating a category, in thinking about what you're building as like a new category that you can then own, right?

[0:00:34]

Hiten Shah: Yeah, that too. Exactly.

[0:00:38]

Steli Efti: I'm building a product, I have a startup, I have a few customers. I have a little bit of revenue. Usually I play in some space that broadly we can define in one way or another. The question now becomes, is it worth the exercise of trying to come up with a new positioning and branding and give this thing that our software does a category name? Maybe two recent examples I can think of HubSpot created the category ... Or named the category of inbound marketing and in content marketing. I think Drift is very recent example of the [inaudible] space where they ... Instead of just saying, "We're doing chat, live chat," which is something that other companies have done before drift. They started framing this as conversational marketing and calling this a big new emerging category and a big new trend. There are many, many other categories. [Gainsight] with Success software, and all that kind of stuff. How do you think about doing category design, does every company need to? And is it just a marketing and branding exercise or does your product really need to do something uniquely different that is its own category in order to be able to do that?

[0:01:57]

Hiten Shah: Yeah, I mean the line in there is, and I have this saved ... I have this saved because I've been thinking about this a lot and the line I would use for that is basically like, "It's much easier to be number one in a category you created." I think that that's really this idea in the book, and this idea, category design, which is age old. I guess my response on this whole thing is most products are already in an existing category. Very few products create a new category, literally like they are already sitting in a new category when they start.