Don't Invent Your Own Product Category

Almost every successful product is a better version of something that already existed. Google was a better search engine, Chrome was a better web browser, the iPhone was a better smartphone. Inventing a new product category does happen, but it’s the rare exception, and it’s a path for only the bravest souls.

Two kinds of category

The word “category” can be used in at least two ways:

• A market category is the problem you solve for a buyer. Expense management, team communication, customer support, network security.
• A product category is the kind of thing you built, the thing a user would call it. A desktop web browser, a CLI coding agent, a password manager.

In this post we’re talking about product categories rather than market categories, because the product category is the one users put your product in.

Users need to know what kind of thing you are

The first thing a user does with a new product is figure out what it’s a version of. Once they place it, they get a whole set of expectations for free. They know roughly what it does, what it competes with, and how to judge it.

If they can’t place it, you have to build all of that understanding from scratch, and most users won’t wait around while you do.

Every category has soft requirements

Getting placed in a category means meeting its soft requirements. Users expect a browser to have a location bar and a back button. If you ship a browser without them, users may not consider it a browser at all, no matter what you call your thing.

The requirements are soft because they can be broken, but only under the right circumstances. If everything else about your product makes it obviously a browser, users will forgive a missing convention or two, but if you break too many at once, you fall out of the category.

Nobody writes these requirements down and nobody enforces them except the user’s pattern matching. You don’t get a vote.

Meet the requirements, then innovate

Once users know what kind of thing you are, you’re free to differentiate. You can put the tabs on the left instead of the top, build in powerful ad blocking, or strip the UI down to almost nothing. Users will see all of that as an interesting browser rather than a confusing non-browser.

Meeting the soft requirements is what gives you the room to be different everywhere else.

Innovation is evolutionary

Real inventions do happen (someone has to be first), like VisiCalc, which invented the spreadsheet and sold Apple IIs on the strength of it, or the Sony Walkman, which invented the portable music player.

The iPhone was a smartphone, Teslas were electric cars, and Uber was a taxi service. Airbnb was a vacation rental site, Dropbox was a cloud storage app, and even ChatGPT was a chatbot, something users already knew from a decade of worse chatbots.

Don’t take on the burden of new

New categories do get created, so this is a real option. If you go this route, you’re taking on two extra challenges on top of building the product itself:

• You have to be right that users will agree the category should exist.
• You have to educate the market about the category before you run out of money.

Entering an existing product category has its own challenges, like competing with the established products, but the best bet for most teams is to make that their primary challenge and face it head-on.