How do you really become a category king

Who wouldn’t want to be a category king controlling 76% of their market?

Exactly.

That’s why everyone is winging out new categories faster than Nicolas Cage whips out new movies.

But few of them stick.

Most of them are just Silicon Valley’s cheap, unsticky pink bubble gum.

💡So, how do you create and dominate a category?

Here’s what a man who has been involved in designing many categories, Dave Kellogg, believes. (screenshot 😉)

→The best way to create a category is to go sell some software.

→ The best way to be a category king is to be the most aggressive company during the growth phase of the market.

And what a coincidence that a while back, I wrote a mini-story on how everyone’s favorite enterprise, Oracle, used the same playbook to beat IBM and other competitors in their category race.

And became the category king of relational databases.

👉Oracle had a worse product than its competitors.

👉Super focused only on acquisition during the category growth phase. Not on innovation/product. The key objective was to grow market share.

👉Also, it heavily evangelized the overall category. Sold the vision of a better tomorrow.

👉As a result, beat IBM, whose research was the foundation of Oracle’s products. (And who “should’ve” won).

Here’s the story, give it a read

And go read Dave’s article also

You’ll get a great book recommendation as well.

So who knows what’s the ultimate playbook for category creation…

But going out and selling a lot and fast during the market growth phase seems like a decent idea.