Hey there,

You’re building something the market doesn’t have a name for yet. There’s no Gartner quadrant. No budget line item. When you describe it to a prospect, they nod thoughtfully and then ask which of their existing problems it solves. You explain that it solves a problem they don’t know they have. This is category creation.

This is different from building a better router or a faster database. In those markets, customers wake up thinking about routers. They know what good looks like. They have vendors, renewal cycles, and comparison spreadsheets. Your job is to win a bake-off.

Category creation is different. The customer doesn’t think about your problem. They don’t have budget allocated. They don’t know how to evaluate what you’re selling because they’ve never bought anything like it. You’re not competing with other vendors. You’re competing with inertia and confusion.

I’m a technical founder. I built a category-creating product. I made almost every mistake you can make. This essay is what I would tell myself if I could go back.

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In a category creation business, almost all the enterprise value lives in go-to-market decisions. Not in the technology. This is deeply unintuitive if you came up through engineering.

Here’s why it happens. R&D costs are essentially fixed or grow sublinearly. You build the core platform once. Maintenance and feature development scale slowly relative to revenue. But sales and distribution are variable costs that grow with revenue, and in category creation, they grow faster and stay higher than in mature markets.

This means your margins, your growth rate, and ultimately your valuation are determined by go-to-market choices: how you price, how you sell, what motion you build, how you position the concept.

The technology is table stakes. Of course it has to work. But the technology is not the hard part. The hard part is teaching thousands of people a new way to think, getting them to believe it matters, and building a system that can repeat that conversation at scale.

Technical founders systematically underestimate this. I certainly did. We spent 80% of our time on the product and maybe 15% on the story, the pricing model, and the sales motion. It should have been the reverse.

If I could go back and change one thing, it would be pricing. Not the product roadmap. Not the team composition. Pricing.

In category creation, pricing determines everything downstream. It determines what sales motion is viable. It determines who you can afford to hire. It determines whether your unit economics will ever work. And you only get one real chance to set it.

Here’s the trap. Early on, you’re desperate for validation. Someone wants to buy? Great! You’ll figure out pricing later. You charge $30,000 for the first deal because it feels like free money and you’re just excited someone gets it. You do that a few more times. Now you’ve anchored the market.

Customers talk. Word spreads. “Oh yeah, we paid about $30K for that.” Two years later, you try to charge $200K for a comparable deal and the buyer looks at you like you’re insane. You’ve permanently encoded a value perception that’s too low to support the business you need to build.

The right way to think about pricing is backwards from the sales motion, not forwards from what feels reasonable.

Start here: what sales motion does this product realistically require?

If you’re selling something truly new, you need real enterprise sales. Direct reps. Long cycles. Deep discovery. Technical validation. Multi-stakeholder consensus. You can’t sell a category-creating product with inside sales and a 20-minute demo. The concept doesn’t exist in the buyer’s head yet. It takes time.

Now model the economics. A good enterprise rep costs $200K in on-target earnings. In a mature market, they might close 15 or 20 deals a year. In an early market where you’re creating the category? Four deals is realistic. Maybe six if you’re lucky and the market is starting to tip.

Do the math. If a rep costs $200K fully loaded and closes five deals, each deal needs to generate at least $80K in gross margin just to break even on that rep. If your gross margin is 70%, you need an ACV around $115K minimum. And that’s just to break even on the sales cost. It doesn’t cover marketing, R&D, or overhead.

This is not optional math. This is physics. If you price at $40K ACV with this sales motion, you lose money on every customer forever. You can’t fix it by scaling. You just lose money faster.

I’ve watched founders say, “We’ll start cheap to build the market, then raise prices later.” It almost never works. Raising prices on existing customers is brutal and distracting. New customers hear the old price through the grapevine. You get stuck.

Your first serious prices aren’t experiments. They’re market education. You’re teaching buyers what this thing is worth. Choose carefully.

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Creating a category requires two distinct jobs, and technical founders usually only do the first one.

Job one: create the concept in the customer’s head. Give it a shape. Make it something they can describe to their boss in one sentence. “It’s like version control but for data.” “It’s observability for machine learning pipelines.” Whatever. The concept has to be simple enough that a non-expert can repeat it accurately.

Job two: attach a dollar value to that concept. This is separate. Ideas don’t carry intrinsic value. Value only emerges in commercial conversations. A buyer has to believe this thing is worth $100K or $500K or whatever you’re charging, and that belief doesn’t come from your slide deck. It comes from negotiation, social proof, and perceived scarcity.

Technical founders overestimate how obvious the value is. We think, “Of course this saves them millions! Look at the ROI!” But the customer doesn’t see it. They see a new thing that requires budget, internal alignment, risk, and change. The value isn’t obvious until you make it obvious, repeatedly, in dozens of conversations.

This takes months. Maybe a year. You have to refine the story constantly. Cut everything that feels precious but doesn’t land. Test different framings. Watch what buyers repeat back to you and what they forget. Get it down to something so simple it feels almost stupid.

I didn’t spend enough time on this. I thought the product would speak for itself. It doesn’t.

Most technical founders treat marketing as the thing you do after the product is built. That’s backwards.

Marketing in category creation has three components:

Product marketing: the story, the positioning, the sales enablement. This is the concept work I just described. It’s foundational.

Demand generation: figuring out who in the whole world might actually buy this, how to reach them, and how to get them into a conversation. You can’t sell to everyone. You need a wedge. A specific persona, a specific use case, a specific pain that’s acute enough to overcome inertia.

Brand: yes, it matters eventually. But early on, brand is a second-order concern. Focus on story and demand.

In the earliest days, your only real currency is the story. You don’t have customers yet. You don’t have case studies. You just have a narrative about why this new thing matters. That narrative is your product.

Articles and press releases help, but they don’t create a category by themselves. Human conversations create categories. You, your co-founders, your first few employees talking to customers and prospects. That’s the channel. Everything else amplifies it.

One thing that matters more than founders expect: analysts. Once you get past early adopters, analysts shape how buyers think. If Gartner or Forrester don’t have a category for what you’re doing, you have to educate them, too. They’re part of the market-making process.

A modern note: developers now control budget in ways that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Developer interest can be a powerful wedge. But developer love alone rarely replaces an enterprise sales motion. Developers get excited, then they have to convince procurement and finance. That’s still enterprise sales.

Selling in an early market is a completely different job than selling in a mature market, and most founders don’t internalize this until it’s too late.

In a mature market, the customer already knows the category. They know the competitors. They’ve probably bought something similar before. The sales conversation is relational and commercial. It’s about terms, pricing, and fit.

In an early market, the sales conversation is technical and educational. The rep has to teach the category. They have to navigate uncertainty and organizational risk. They have to coordinate multiple stakeholders who don’t agree on the problem, let alone the solution.

This requires a different kind of salesperson. I call them “renaissance reps.” They can sell with technical depth. They can handle ambiguity. They’re entrepreneurial. They can work without a detailed playbook because the playbook doesn’t exist yet.

These people are rare and expensive. And even when you hire them, they don’t hit full productivity immediately. There’s a sales learning curve. Early on, a rep might not even pay for themselves. Productivity improves as the market matures, as you refine the story, as the product stabilizes.

At some point, the market tips. The category becomes real. You can hire more “coin-operated” salespeople who execute a defined playbook. But that only works after you’ve done the hard work of creating the playbook.

The biggest mistake I see: premature sales scaling. Founders hire a big sales team before product-market fit because they think that’s what growth looks like. But a hungry sales team without a working playbook is dangerous. They chase random opportunities. They over-customize. They pull product in conflicting directions. You lose all signal about what the market actually wants.

Scale sales only after the early motion is clearly repeating. Even if that feels painfully slow.

Here’s a typical enterprise motion: intro, discovery, proof of concept, technical validation, commercial negotiation.

The biggest mistake is talking pricing too early. If you quote a number before the customer has reduced technical and organizational risk, they anchor on that number in a context where they don’t yet believe in the value. Then, when they do the POC and realize this thing actually works, they still remember the low anchor.

Delay pricing conversations until real risk has been addressed. Let them see it work. Let them imagine it in production. Then talk numbers.

Also: large enterprises will happily consume your expertise without committing to anything. They’ll keep you in “interesting conversations” for months. They’ll ask for custom features. They’ll want free POCs that look suspiciously like contract engineering.

You have to recognize when you’re being used as a free R&D shop. If a customer wants deep custom work before they’ll commit to a scalable product purchase, that’s a warning sign. You’re not building a product company. You’re building a consulting company that happens to write code.

Draw boundaries. Be willing to walk away from deals that don’t fit the repeatable motion you’re trying to build.

Investors hate professional services. Low margin. Not scalable. Distracts from product.

I get it. But in early enterprise markets, some level of PS is often necessary.

Here’s why: your product is new. Customers don’t know how to deploy it. Their infrastructure is a mess. They need hand-holding. If you don’t provide that, they’ll fail to get value, churn, and tell others it doesn’t work.

Also, customers are more comfortable if you’re directly involved in the implementation. It reduces their perceived risk. They’re betting on something unproven. Your involvement is part of the risk mitigation.

The trick is to use PS strategically. It’s a transitional tool. You learn how customers actually use the product. You figure out what the real deployment patterns are. You build runbooks and best practices. Then you hand that off to partners once there’s clear demand and the category exists.

If you’re still doing heavy PS three years in, something is wrong. But in year one? It’s often necessary.

Technical founders often think: “If we could just partner with [big incumbent], they’d distribute our product and we’d scale instantly.”

This almost never works in a pre-market situation.

Channels and resellers perform well when there’s already demand. When customers are asking for the thing. When the category is established and it’s just a matter of distribution.

But channels don’t evangelize. They don’t create categories. They don’t do the hard work of teaching a new concept. They take orders. If there are no orders, they won’t do anything.

OEM deals are similar. You think a big vendor will bundle your product and suddenly you’ll reach their entire customer base. In reality, their salespeople don’t know how to sell it, don’t get compensated for it, and ignore it.

Build your own go-to-market motion first. Prove the category exists. Create demand. Then channels become useful. But they won’t save you early on.

Are you in a true category creation scenario, or are you just building a better version of something that already exists?

Have you modeled sales economics from rep OTE down to required ACV and margin? Does the math actually work?

Are your first real prices high enough to support the sales model you’ll actually need, or are you anchoring too low?

Do you have a simple story that a non-technical buyer can repeat accurately to their boss?

Are you hiring sales reps for the market you have, or the market you wish you had?

Are you drifting into contract engineering, or are you building a repeatable product?

Are you using professional services strategically, or are they becoming the business by accident?

Are you counting on a channel or OEM to fix your distribution problem?

If I started over, I’d design the sales model and pricing first. I’d let that discipline my product choices. I’d spend far more time on the story and far less time adding features nobody asked for.

I’d delay scaling sales until the early market motion was repeating cleanly, even if investors pressured me to grow faster.

I’d recognize that in category creation, the widget isn’t the business. Go-to-market is the business. The widget just has to be good enough to support the motion.

And I’d remember that the value isn’t in what you build. It’s in what the market believes about what you built. That belief is constructed, painfully, one conversation at a time.

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