The Question

April Dunford -- bestselling author of Obviously Awesome (widely considered the definitive book on product positioning), former VP Marketing at seven B2B startups (six acquired), and consultant to over 200 companies -- offers the sharpest counterargument. Most companies jumping to category creation are doing so because they cannot answer basic positioning questions.

"Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world, delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about."

April Dunford

▶ 00:11:30

Dunford's five-step positioning process -- competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, best-fit customers, market category -- forces clarity before ambition. The market category step comes last, not first. You might discover that your best positioning puts you in an existing category where you can win immediately, rather than a new one that requires years of market education.

In her guest post on Lenny's newsletter -- still one of the most popular posts of all time -- Dunford explicitly warns against premature category creation. She calls it Trap 3: "assuming that you have to create a new market category to grow." Her empirical insight from 200+ engagements is that most "failed category creation" attempts are actually failed positioning attempts in disguise. The company could not articulate its value in an existing category, so it tried to create a new one where it would not have to compete. That is not category creation. That is avoidance.

As Lenny's newsletter on differentiation reinforces, drawing on Michael Porter: "Competing to be unique is ultimately more sustainable than competing to be the best." But the path to uniqueness does not require creating a new category -- it requires understanding where you are genuinely different and positioning yourself where that difference matters most.

Hamilton Helmer -- author of 7 Powers (credited by Patrick Collison, Peter Thiel, Reed Hastings, and Daniel Ek as foundational to their strategic thinking) and founder of Strategy Capital -- reframes the entire debate through the lens of structural advantage.

"Almost every startup that you want to deal with starts with counter positioning because remember what product market fit is primarily is a substitution. You are coming up with a way to satisfy a more or less existing need in a novel way that creates more value."

Hamilton Helmer

▶ 00:18:13

"If you don't have counter positioning at that point you're pretty high risk from an incumbent who already has the capabilities necessary to do that. They just have to extend their product or do this or that, but counter positioning is the refuge from that."

Hamilton Helmer

▶ 00:19:19

Helmer's insight resolves the Lochhead-Dunford tension. The question is not "should I create a category or position in one?" It is "can I build something that incumbents structurally cannot copy?" If yes, you have counter-positioning -- and the category will emerge as a consequence. If no, you are competing on operational excellence, which Helmer explicitly dismisses:

"You're on a treadmill and if you stop running on that treadmill, you get creamed, but it's not power. The things that drive operational excellence can be mimicked."

Hamilton Helmer

▶ 00:00:20

Netflix did not just create the "streaming" category. It counter-positioned against Blockbuster with a model Blockbuster could not copy without cannibalizing its store revenue and late fees. Then it layered on scale economies -- spreading the fixed cost of content (roughly 50% of cost structure) across more subscribers than any competitor could match. The category creation was a consequence of the strategic positioning, not the cause.

Andy Raskin -- strategic narrative consultant whose blog post "The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen" (about Zuora) became one of the most shared articles in startup strategy, and who has worked with companies including Gong on their core narratives -- offers the most practical unifying approach.

"The way I learned how to pitch in business school, and I think the way most people did is what I call the arrogant doctor. So you have a problem, a pain, I have a solution, a treatment, and I'm going to tell you why it's better than all the other treatments."

Andy Raskin

▶ 00:00:00

"Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift the shift from the old game to a new game. The archetypal example of this, I think in the business world, is what Benioff did with Salesforce."

Andy Raskin

▶ 00:00:00

Raskin's framework replaces both "what category should we create?" and "how should we position?" with a different starting question: what shift in the world makes our approach inevitable? When Salesforce declared that software was over and the cloud was the new game, that was category creation -- but it felt like naming an undeniable change. When Zuora (founded by Salesforce employee #11, Tien Tzuo) declared the shift from transactions to the "subscription economy," the category of subscription management became self-evident. When Gong declared the shift from "opinions" to "reality" in sales management, their category emerged naturally.

"This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"

Andy Raskin

▶ 00:00:00