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Messaging framework for B2B tech: from features to outcomes
February 2, 2026
Stop trying to invent a new category. Learn why category positioning b2b strategies focused on differentiation grow 3.5x faster than category creators.
Let's be honest. You have looked at HubSpot. You have looked at Salesforce. And part of you, perhaps the part that just closed a seed round or is staring down the barrel of a Series B board meeting, thinks: "We need to do that. We need to invent a category."
It is the Silicon Valley dream. You don't just want to be a player in the game. You want to build the stadium, write the rules, and sell the tickets.
But here is the cold water we need to splash on your face right now. For 90% of B2B SaaS companies, trying to create a category is a death sentence. It is an expensive, ego-driven trap that burns cash and confuses buyers who just want to know how you can fix their spreadsheet headache today.
Smart founders know that the real magic often lies in category positioning B2B strategies that leverage existing demand rather than trying to manufacture it from thin air. You don't always need a new lane. Sometimes, you just need a faster car in the lane everyone is already driving in.
In this guide, we are going to dismantle the mythology around category creation. We will look at why differentiation is statistically safer, how to position yourself without looking like a copycat, and exactly when you might actually be the rare exception who should build that new stadium.
Before we start throwing stones at the concept of category creation, we need to define our terms. In the boardroom, these words get thrown around interchangeably, but they are fundamentally different strategic maneuvers.
Positioning is context-setting. It answers the question "What are you?" by anchoring your product to something the customer already understands. It is about defining how you are the best in the world at delivering a specific value to a well-defined set of customers.
When you position, you are saying, "We are like X, but for Y." You are banking on the fact that the customer already has a budget line item for X. This approach aligns with the principles of effective B2B positioning that connects your unique value to existing market understanding.
Category Creation, on the other hand, is the act of selling a new problem and a new solution simultaneously. You are not just saying you are better. You are saying the old way of evaluating vendors is obsolete. You have to invent a new frame of reference.
As April Dunford often notes, if you create a category called a "Fluflommer," you first have to spend five years and fifty million dollars teaching the market what a Fluflommer is before you can sell a single one.
This decision isn't binary. According to the T2D3 strategy framework, it exists on a spectrum of market maturity. You generally find yourself in one of three scenarios:
No alternatives exist. Customers are cobbling together manual processes or spreadsheets. The problem is real but unsolved. You are genuinely first to market with a software solution.
Example: Slack in 2013. Email and IRC existed, but no modern, searchable team communication platform did. They had to educate the market on why "team chat" deserved its own budget line.
Ten competitors already exist. Buyers have clear expectations. The category is mature. Your job is to carve out a defensible position through vertical focus, workflow specialization, or specific persona targeting.
Example: Most CRM, project management, and marketing automation companies live here. The battle is won through differentiation without new features, not category invention.
A related category exists, but a new buying motion or delivery model creates whitespace. You are not inventing the wheel. You are adding power steering.
Example: Superhuman didn't create "email." They created "email for people who live in their inbox and will pay $30/month for speed." They positioned adjacent to Gmail, not against it.
Most Series A-C companies we talk to think they are in scenario one. In reality, they are almost always in scenario two or three. And that is actually good news. It means you don't have to spend half your funding on explaining why a problem exists. This understanding is crucial for effective marketing strategy that meets buyers where they already are.
Despite the risks, there are times when creating a new lane is the only viable path. It is seductive for a reason. If you pull it off, you become the "Category King," capturing the lion's share of the market economics.
But you should only swipe right on this strategy if you meet specific, rigorous criteria.
If your customers are currently hacking together spreadsheets, email threads, and interns to solve a problem because literally no software exists to do it, you might be a category creator. If they aren't comparing you to a competitor because there are no competitors, you have a blank canvas.
But be warned: the competitor is often "doing nothing" or "status quo," which is the toughest competitor of all.
You cannot just be 10% better or 15% cheaper. To create a category, the underlying philosophy of the existing category must be flawed.
Salesforce didn't just build a better CRM. They argued that "Software" (meaning on-premise, difficult-to-install code) was dead. They sold a new delivery model that rendered the old model absurd.
Similarly, HubSpot didn't just create better marketing tools. They invented "Inbound Marketing" as a counter-philosophy to interruptive advertising. They needed that conceptual framework to justify why companies should buy an entirely new stack of tools.
This is the part most founders ignore. Category creation requires you to be a media company first and a software company second. You need the runway and resources to host conferences, write best-selling books, and define the vocabulary of the industry.
You must be ready to sell the problem for years before you can sell the product at scale.
What this looks like in practice:
Category creation is a venture-scale bet. You need at least 3-5 years of runway and the ability to burn cash on education before expecting meaningful revenue. If you are bootstrapped or running lean, this is not your path.
Look at Harvey in the legal tech space. They aren't just trying to be a "better legal search tool." They are attempting to define a new category of "Domain-Specific Generative AI for Law."
They are partnering with incumbents like LexisNexis to gain trust while simultaneously redefining the standard for AI-native legal work. They are moving beyond "tools" to "platform" status.
This is a high-risk, high-reward play that requires immense capital (they've raised $100M+) and partnership leverage to pull off. Notice they didn't try this as a seed-stage company. They waited until they had the resources to execute at the scale category creation demands.
For the vast majority of you reading this, competing in an existing lane (differentiation) is the superior strategy. It allows for faster sales cycles, lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), and clearer messaging, the kind of clarity that drives demand generation results.
Data from the Martal Group suggests that companies with clear, compelling differentiators grow 3.5x faster than their peers. Why? Because clarity sells.
When a buyer understands what you do instantly, they can categorize you, budget for you, and buy you. When you try to be unique, you often just end up being confusing.
Think about it from the buyer's perspective. They wake up Monday morning with a problem: "Our sales team is losing deals because we can't track customer interactions." They Google "sales CRM" or ask a peer. They have a mental model of what a CRM does and what it costs.
If you tell them you are a "Customer Success Intelligence Platform," you just added 20 minutes of explanation to a conversation that should take 5 minutes. You are fighting their existing mental models instead of leveraging them.
Here is a hard truth about B2B sales: it is easier to steal budget than to create it.
If a company has allocated $50,000 for "Project Management Software," and you pitch them a "Collaborative Work OS," you have to convince the CFO to create a new line item. If you pitch them "Project Management Software that developers won't hate," you just need them to switch vendors.
According to research, 86% of B2B buyers are willing to pay more for a differentiated customer experience. They want a solution that feels tailored to them, not a generic tool that claims to solve a problem they didn't know they had.
Let's look at the graveyard. Approximately 90% of global startups fail. For AI startups specifically, Digital Silk reports that 42% fail due to insufficient market demand. This is the classic category creation trap: building something brilliant that nobody wants to buy because nobody knows they need it.
History suggests that category creators often lose to "fast followers" anyway. Being first isn't the advantage you think it is. Being best is. April Dunford points out that 90% of tech companies that have gone public in the last five years were positioned in existing markets, not new ones. They didn't invent the car; they just built the Tesla.
So, if you aren't building a new stadium, how do you win the game? You execute a ruthless category positioning B2B strategy that focuses on sub-segmentation and specific attributes. You create a "fast lane" on the existing highway.
Most founders are terrified of shrinking their Total Addressable Market (TAM). They think, "If we target everyone, we can sell to everyone." The opposite is true. If you target everyone, you sell to no one.
Instead of "CRM for Business," try "CRM for Construction." Suddenly, Procore isn't just another software company. They are the industry standard for a massive vertical. They didn't create the category of construction management. They just owned it so hard that nobody else could get in.
The vertical specialization formula:
Start with: "We are [existing category] for [specific industry/persona]"
Examples:
The magic happens when your niche is big enough to build a $100M+ company but small enough that you can own it completely. Construction tech? $12B market. Legal tech? $28B market. Healthcare tech? $500B+ market. You don't need to invent new categories when verticals this large exist with under-served sub-segments.
This is classic judo. You take the incumbent's greatest strength and reframe it as a weakness.
You cannot be the best at everything. Pick one thing that matters desperately to your target buyer and become unbeatable at it.
Speed: Linear owns this in issue tracking. Their entire brand is built on being the fastest, most responsive tool. Every design decision reinforces speed.
Privacy: DuckDuckGo owns this in search. They are not trying to out-feature Google. They are the privacy-first alternative for people who care about that one thing.
Simplicity: Basecamp owns this in project management. While competitors add AI and integrations, Basecamp stays deliberately simple.
Developer experience: Vercel, Stripe, and Twilio all own this in their respective categories. They are not the cheapest or the most feature-rich. They are the ones developers actually want to use.
This attribute-based positioning works particularly well in crowded B2B SaaS markets where functional parity is high but experiential differences create loyalty.
Linear is the perfect example of winning without category creation. They entered the "Issue Tracking" market, a Red Ocean dominated by the massive giant, Atlassian (Jira). Did Linear try to invent a new term like "Flow State Engineering Cloud"? No.
They positioned themselves as "The issue tracker for software teams." They focused purely on speed, design, and developer experience.
While Jira tries to serve marketing, HR, and Ops teams with a million features, Linear said, "We are for software builders who care about craft." They carved out a massive, high-value segment without needing to explain what "issue tracking" is. They grew by being the Ferrari in a parking lot full of minivans.
What Linear did right:
If you need help defining your specific differentiator, our marketing strategy services can help sharpen that edge.
Let's get practical. How does this look on a landing page? Here are some before-and-after scenarios to illustrate the difference between vague category creation and sharp differentiation.
Bad (vague category creation):
Good (clear differentiation):
Bad (trying to be unique):
Good (clear positioning):
If your current messaging feels a bit like the "Bad" examples above, our content strategy services can help you rewrite the script to speak directly to your target buyer.
Bad (generic category creation):
Good (vertical differentiation):
Before you bet the entire company's trajectory on a positioning statement, you need to validate it. You don't need a million dollars to do this. You just need a few weeks and some honest conversations.
April Dunford suggests testing positioning in live sales calls, not just on landing pages. Dedicate two weeks to a new pitch script.
Week 1: Position as Category Creator
Week 2: Position as Differentiated Alternative
If you position as a "New Category," watch the prospect's face. Do they look confused? Do they tilt their head? If you have to spend the first 20 minutes explaining why the problem exists, you are in "Category Creation" mode. Ask yourself: Do we have the runway for this?
If you position as a "Competitor Alternative," do they immediately ask about price or specific features? This is a Green Flag. It means they have anchored you. They understand the box you are in. Now you just have to prove you are the best thing in that box.
Run a simple split test on your demo request page:
Variant A (Category Creation):
Variant B (Differentiation):
Measure the conversion to demo. Usually, Variant B wins for early-stage companies because it captures existing intent. It connects with the research the buyer has already done.
If you want to dive deeper into how your brand appears during these tests, our brand strategy services can help you craft positioning that resonates.
For 2025 and beyond, the data is screaming at us. Differentiation is the superior strategy for most B2B SaaS startups. With capital becoming more expensive and CAC rising to $2.00 for every $1.00 of new ARR, the efficiency of selling into an existing budget outweighs the theoretical upside of owning a new category.
Founders, take a breath. You don't need to be the next Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone. You can build a massive, profitable, unicorn-status company by simply being the absolute best option for a specific group of people who are desperate for a better way.
Start by niching down. Dominate a sub-segment. Create a "fast lane" on the highway. Once you have the market share and the cash flow, then - and only then - can you think about building your own stadium.
Don't confuse your brand personality with your market category. You can have a unique, vibrant brand positioning (like Liquid Death) while selling a commodity product (Water). In B2B, be Liquid Death, not a "Hydration Platform."
If you are ready to stop guessing and start winning your market, let's talk about your category positioning B2B approach. Our brand strategy and marketing strategy teams have helped dozens of B2B SaaS companies sharpen their positioning and accelerate growth. Contact us to start the conversation.
