Category Creation Lab: The Play Bigger Podcast
The Play Bigger Founder's Workbook
You are listening to Category Creation Lab, the Play Bigger Podcast. On today's episode, Play Bigger Partners Jason Welcome and Mike Bruno explore brand new research from our newest ebook, The Play Bigger Founder's Workbook. During their research, they investigated over 1,000 updates early stage founders shared with their investors and uncovered a set of stubborn and near universal pain points each of these founders experience. In today's episode, Mike and Jason outlined the issues, the causes, and the different approaches early stage founders can take to mitigate them. Now, without further ado, here is Category Creation Lab. We've been working a lot more with earlier stage companies, right, and talking and having a lot more conversations. So we had this sort of anecdotal understanding that, wow, category design really is important to this class of companies. And I think that we spent a lot of time working with later stage growth companies, even some public companies. But over the last two years, we've really spent a lot of time with earlier stage, just nature of the industry at the time, at the moment, venture in general, the money's flowing there. But what we found is that, wow, the impact, the value creation is pretty powerful, but it's still anecdotal. And like, diving into this book and the research was really also an exploration of like, can we validate what we're seeing in our day to day, right? Like, can we expand the pool of founders that we're talking to venture capitalists that we're talking to to really reinforce, do these pain points exist more universally? And is category design really something that should be used at that stage? And I think the answer was a profound yes. But what we found even in that and what we're able to share now is, I think really valuable for founders at that stage, earlier stage, as they think about, you know, how are they going to grow, right? Yeah, like that key point, where is the growth going to come from as a point you made to me earlier? And I think it's exactly right. But I think what's interesting too, about what you're saying is like, our focus has always been those growth stage companies. And then there was, as you said, like market conditions changed a bit, and all of a sudden we had an influx of early stage companies. In fact, we had a post earlier that was, you know, hey, this is a category design nursery, because this is when a lot of the category kings and queens tend to sort of start to incorporate and become companies very early stage. And so there are a lot more of these folks coming to us. And while that big question is always the same, I think, regardless of what size, what stage company, or even if you're a public company, which is, where is the growth going to come from? I think what's a little bit different is maybe the symptoms and how you sort of experience the pain of sort of not knowing those things. And that's what this book was all about, is we know that quite well for that growth stage, you know, that's that's what we've been doing. But what about the earlier stage founders? How do these sort of telltale signs start to show up that a founder could use to then, you know, vault themselves to that category contender, ultimately King or Queen, and that 76% market share we talk about often. Yeah, I wonder too, Jason, if you could talk a little bit about like this bigger problem of market myopia and sort of how that is felt by companies and what that actually means. And then we can get to some of the details. Yeah, and I think that so market my opias are shorthand for what we what the problem we solve, right, with category design. But what that means nothing to anyone until you start to explain it, right? And I think it does really stem from the question that's on all founders, CEOs, business leaders, minds is where how am I going to grow and how they tend to answer that question is they think, okay, I'm going to look at the market today and I'm going to have to react to it. I'm going to have to compete within it. I'm going to have to be better than everyone else out there. And that's sort of a blindness that we call market myopia, right, that you have to do those things that you have to adapt to the market as exists. And the reality is, is they're blind, they're blind to an alternative approach to actually create a new market, right, design a new category, create a new category. And that blindness sort of tends to have you sort of swirl in a bunch of different directions depending on what stage you're at. But that sort of gets into them like all the symptoms of this bigger problem, this blindness, this myopia of market of the market, and having to participate in the market as it exists today is, is they show up in different ways, right? For the earlier stage companies, I would kind of want to go through that list that you keep on referring back to of, for those early stage companies, how does it show up for them, right? It just show up with investors more often than say, hey, you know, the market for a public company. Yeah, where else does it show up? Because, you know, they they suffer from the same blindness, they still have to grow, right? They have to figure out how do I validate this idea now that I've built this sort of product around and how I drive urgency around people buying what I've built, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, I mean, I have the research right in front of me. So out of those thousand, you know, investor updates that we looked at, 85% of them are talking about a lack of customer urgency. So there's excitement often in the sales pipeline. People say, wow, you really are doing something different. And you know, if you've gotten to this stage, even, you know, seed series A companies, you've got something that's sort of usually technically different than what's out there already. And probably is a little bit better, a little faster, a little less expensive, whatever it may be. And there's a lot to be proud of in the sort of, you know, technology behind it. But people get that a lot of times the customers understand, well, this is novel and interesting. But they're not always ready to make the jump from what they've already invested in, which is more likely an established company who, you know, as we've said before, odds are are some kind of a category king or queen. And so making that move is quite different than being excited by your sales pitch. Yeah, even status quo is probably one of the biggest, is probably one of the biggest issues with people like, well, I'm actually fine with how things are right now, right? Yeah. The things I use now work well enough for what we do. And the incremental improvement and the pain of changing. Yeah. If you're just better, then I don't know why I should buy, right? Yeah. And so the or why I should buy right now, you know, maybe eventually I'll put you in our procurement mix. And the next time this contract's up for review, you know, we'll put you in there and we'll see what we think. But even then we heard from founders in the same sort of area that like, it is very difficult, which we know from experience to compete with those entrenched leaders. But that was one of a lack of customer urgency. Another one is the this sort of investor skepticism. 80% felt investor skepticism. Yeah. And what's interesting about that is when we have these conversations, where we look at the sort of investor updates, we see like, they're trying to put us into this box of companies that they understand. We're being unfairly compared to companies A, B and C, but we have features D, E and F, which they don't. And we look at this as something that's much bigger than what they're putting us into. And so that was another thing that came up, you know, particularly on the investor side, but also, you know, a bit on the customer side as well, and the procurement teams as well, when companies are trying to work, you know, in the B2B space with a procurement team. And that was something that was, you know, obviously very prevalent at 80% among these founders. Yeah. And so they've still are not only are they saying, Hey, I'm trying to show on better than all these things. I have to do that with customers. I have to do money still has to flow from VC for this company to reach its potential. And the VCs tend to like to see the world as well through the size of like, what's the comparables? What's the market share you're going to steal versus the market share you could create with a new market, right? Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. That's exactly right. And then in the market like this, where, you know, and seed in series A, I think is doing better than BCD and then, you know, late stage growth in terms of the amount of companies that are being funded. But it's still way off what it was two years ago. And so the idea that you aren't able to completely express what you can accomplish because of this bias in investors who are trying to say, you're like one of these. So they're being approached by hundreds, sometimes thousands of companies who, you know, and it's been famously said, like, there are only, you know, 10 ideas out there. And everybody's got the idea. Why are you different than those things? And so it's really hard for companies to express that when they're being put into this box. And they feel like they're not being given that sort of soapbox or ability to talk about what they have, or maybe they don't even have the language themselves to talk about what's different. Yeah. And what's great, what I love about this book too, is that there's, there's a bunch of quotes and insights from founders and VCs. And there's a great one in there about, you know, don't make me build the comparable for you. It's your job to show me the different that you are, the bigger thing that you are to articulate that vision for me in a way that I'm like, oh, wow, this expanded my view of the world. So if we leave it to the venture capitalists to decide what box you are put in, they're not going to, they're not going to rush to write a check, right? Yeah, that's right. So there are a thousand email updates that we look at, but we also interviewed eight different founders and investors. So we also have, in addition to that sort of qualitative research, we have, I'm sorry, quantitative research, we have this qualitative, you know, aspect from, you know, folks like Jamie Montgomery from March Capital and a whole bunch of others as well that I think bring a lot of value. And I think add a lot of color to, you know, a stat like that, 80% of folks are meeting investor skepticism. Why is that? Well, they're not understanding exactly what we do. And by the way, as a VC, that's not really my responsibility. You need to give me those tools. Yeah. So what are some other pain points that that showed up to that sort of lead to this bigger problem that we. Yeah, another one that was, you know, maybe like gets talked about less, but I think is equally telling, which is the sort of difficulty in scaling. So you've got the sort of AR going in the right way, you've got the investment, and now you really need to scale and start adding not just whoever's available, but the top quality, top quality people. And those conversations quite often mirror the pipeline that I just talked about where you've got enthusiasm. But the conversations tend to end with is just not the right time. So you've got a top tier CTO, a top tier CMO, whatever it is that you need at that time. And you can't quite close the door on that top talent, which as we know in this business, that's what's going to sort of separate people in this sort of very early stage as you start to build the foundation of the company. So that was another thing that people felt actually 80% as well of the investor letters or investor updates that we looked at mentioned some kind of scaling issue. So the human capital that's going to take to get to that break out stage. I think it's also a function of, you know, a lot of founders will find that early growth. And they're like, all right, this is great. We're growing, right? But the expectation is this exponential growth, right? And early adopters often can be conflated with sort of the market, you know, this is the market. And it's a classic, you know, sort of how do you cross the chasm, right? As more would say. And you haven't got to that chasm yet when you're sort of early stage. And how are you going to cross that? How are you going to scale, get the human capital in addition to the more mainstream companies? Yeah. And especially at this stage, you know, your seed series A, you know, you're studying this, this is also in the book we talk a lot about, well, hey, founder let's say this is super important. At this stage, you have to be able to do that as a founder and it's core to your business. And I think a lot of people would argue like you should never stop doing that. But you can't be the only one doing that. And so there was a lot of also, you know, part and parcel to that scaling challenge is the inability to seamlessly transition or start to delegate some of those responsibilities, for instance, from a sales perspective to capable folks who then can sort of speak from the same song sheet that you were as a founder. And you know, anybody who knows anything about sales, you don't want to give people scripts, you want to give them a sort of deep understanding of who you are and what products you sell and why you sell them so that they can then sort of internalize this and sell in that way. And so being able to do that, I think proves hard for a lot of founders at this stage. And that's one another thing that we found in this research. Yeah, they need to scale themselves in the founding team, right? Because they've been on the road. And I actually was having a conversation with one of our founders this last week, who's essentially just been laid low sick traveling nonstop and is just clearly now realizing sort of how do I how do I build that foundation so that I am replicable? How do I replicate what I do in a way that I feel good about that I'm not like dictating or controlling the people that need to go out there and do this work? But I'm giving them the right tools to be successful and even maybe innovate on top of what what we've done so far. Yeah, and I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. But the answer to that is like deep, deep clarity, you know, and we'll get into that in a little bit more. But there were there were two others. So one of them was resource misallocation. What we found is a lot of times these investor updates, there would be, you know, an initial investor update and then there would be the sort of follow up and the initial investor update. And we call out a few examples of this in the book might say, Hey, we're going to pursue this path and we're really excited about it. And then the follow up would be like, we pursued that path and it was a very wrong path. And I think, you know, there there is a lot of, you know, when you're talking about building a company at this stage, failure and agile sort of model makes a lot of sense. But in a lot of the sort of responses that we read or the investor updates that we read, we saw that they were sort of almost like a misguided misallocation of resources. Like that's something that could have been averted and these founders recognized it. So this misallocation of resource, about 70% of companies expressed some kind of, you know, misallocation of resources in their updates. We made this mistake in what we invested in and pursued. Yeah, I mean, and that's like this, this dogma of lean startup, right? Like, I'm going to iterate my way to a really amazing company. And I think that those principles are really important principles, but they still have to be done within focus because you can iterate your way to to demise as well. You can iterate your way to an empty bank account. And so we often talk about, like, what's the before you get into that sort of mindset and that approach? How do you make sure you have sort of this problem market fit, right? How do you actually think about, how do I iterate on the problem in a way that then has an impact? And then I build the actual product and spend the resources trying to solve that problem versus, you know, just trying to build really cool things and that people will react to in a positive way, which we know doesn't necessarily drive sales, right? So exactly. And that actually is a perfect segue to the last piece, which is the big, gigantic one 95% of the investor updates mentioned this in some way or another. And it is a difficulty in customer acquisition, getting those customers into the pipeline, and then closing those deals, but then also holding on to those deals, you know, all those kinds of things. So like 95% of companies sort of feel this issue. And a lot of times it's an assumption that the innovation itself is going to be a draw. So we read that in these investor updates. We hear, hey, our innovation is novel. And it does X, Y, and Z better than whatever big gorilla is in the room that we're challenging. And so therefore, people are going to have to get this because we get it. And what we found was, well, I'll read you, I'll read you one of the quotes from a seed stage founder, which is, we onboarded a total of seven teams with a total of 58 people. Three of those are from our personal network. We need more intros from our investors. Can you help? So like, there's this sort of issue in like the companies that are coming in, like, are coming in through this very small network. And there isn't this sort of, you know, broader awareness of what's happening and the fact that you're different. And another one from, again, Jamie Montgomery of March Capital, early success with customers and the randomness of that success will fool you into thinking other customers are like minded. The real test is selling to customers you don't know and don't have a warm intro to at scale. So this is something that a lot of the founders, like 95% of them that we looked into actually expressing. Yeah, that's pretty, yeah, that's pretty important, right? How do you break beyond sort of, and that's got to be a pretty bad book, asking your VCs to fill your pipeline. Yeah, that's got to be a big warning sign for any VC. And I do think like there's this idea of, you know, you got to break through the noise, but it's not just enough to break through the noise. You have to break through noise and have people take action, right? That actually move into consideration and down that path, that journey to actually buying and staying as a customer. And that takes more than just shiny objects, right? And in cool innovation, we see stories in the media all the time, like, this is an amazing new technology, but no company that has enduring value materializes around it, right? It's a great media and story. And hey, maybe you got some good press for your cool innovation, but is it a business and enduring business? Is it a business that's going to have exponential value creation? That's a different game. Yeah, I totally agree. So just to kind of sum up here, we've got this sort of big overarching issue, which as you mentioned, we're calling market myopia is really our shorthand for this sort of blindness that happens when you look at the way that things are right now versus the way that they could be. So the current market and the conditions of that market and the rules of sort of how companies show up and what certain types and classes of products do, irregardless of what they could do, starts to make it difficult for founders and investors, as we saw, to see the bigger opportunity and then to organize their company sort of in a way that will help them do that. And that is manifest in different ways, as we said. So this might be a little bit different for larger companies, late stage, growth stage, even public companies might experience market myopia in a different way. But the way that these seed and early stage companies tend to experience it is across those five pain points that we talked about, which are lack of customer urgency, resource misallocation, difficulty in customer acquisition, the scaling challenges, hiring those people and getting them in the door, and then investor skepticism. So when you start to feel these five things, that's when you should start to ask yourself, do I need to be doing more innovating and more better communication, or do I need to start thinking about how I create something different? Yeah. And we talk a lot about the importance of different over better, right? Different is what drives the type of attention and pull through that that can win in a marketplace. It's really highly competitive and very noisy. But different is typically means that you're also addressing an unsolved problem, right? Problem that people didn't know they had or didn't believe could be solved. And that's what I think even getting into like, okay, then how do you solve all these pain points, right? Obviously, like our solution is that no, there's actually material ways in which the category design process and then the delivery against creating a new category actually solves these problems. Yeah. Yeah. And what's so funny is, you know, I have a friend of mine who's he's actually a private equity guy, but he does judo, you know, and he was telling me about this the other day. And he's like, it's like, it's like hugging in pajamas. That's what he calls it. You know, but but he was talking to me about, you know, different moves. And it's sort of, you know, people know this about judo is you're sort of using the momentum of something against itself. And you're sort of moving out and moving into sort of a different space instead of pushing against something, you're sort of making movements to change. And I think that that's a really appropriate metaphor for what's going on here. When you base adversity, what's the first thing that you want to do? Something pushes against you. You want to push back. And that's, you know, not only is that I think human nature and instinct, but it's also the way that classical business theory is taught. You know, this is how you have to do it. The sort of polar wars and the, you know, different sort of companies fighting each other. And the reality is, it can be much more successful to move from that competition and to move away from that sort of drug of competition where we sort of think of ourselves as these warriors who are going to big in our heels. And that's the only way we'll be successful into a sort of bigger picture. You're actually going to expand your mind, expand your vision and create something that's different and not push back and fight back, but change the goal post and change all of the rules and create an entire blueprint for how this thing has to be done. And therefore have a very unfair advantage over anybody else who wants to come in there and try to push back against you. Yeah. Yeah, very well said. And I find what's interesting though, too, is that one of the first questions you get is like, oh, that's really expensive. That's going to cost so much. How can I do that in my limited resources? And really what we say is what we see is no, no, it's not expensive. It's just an orientation of how you approach what you're already doing, right? It's how you think about what the way you're allocating resources now. It's how you're thinking about the focus and alignment that you're trying to drive right now. Yeah. And then the output is the create that you're starting to now create instead of compete, right? You're reorienting all that energy. Like you said, the judo analogy is perfect, right? Instead of pushing against, and you're right, we're all trained that way in business school, but even before that, right? It's in our culture to go compete, be sports. That's great if you're trying to make incremental gains. But when you're actually trying to put a dent in the world or build something big and enduring, you do have to not compete but create, right? You have to create something new and you have to channel that energy and effort into creating that. And then that's sort of the script that the category design provides, right? It allows you to move from that competing mindset into, okay, now how do I create and do that through the building of a great product and building of a great company, right? Yeah. And to your point about like, this is too much. So if you think about it, you know, from the perspective of like, hey, I've got an option here, I'm going to create my TAM, I'm going to look at the current market, I'm going to look at what these sort of big companies are going to be doing, and I'm going to start to steal, share from them, x percent, whatever it is, that has a sort of limit on it unless you do something that is completely extraordinary, which is to undercut a company and take them down, which rarely happens, you know, unless you're doing something that's different and changing the goal post. So you automatically, even at this stage, seed series A, you automatically start to handicap that potential, whereas if you went in with that sort of creation mindset and are able to say, this is not the sort of just TAM, but it's also the potential of an entire category. So this many people that we've identified have this problem. And in our research, we found it costs them x amount of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars, and they're willing to spend, you know, x amount of billions, millions, whatever it is, that times the number of people equals your category potential. And so you can shoot for something that is enormous at that stage and the sort of the potential that you have done as a company is much higher. And it also then will help you organize as you sort of have these conversations, why are we doing this? Why should you invest in this? Why should you buy this product? Because we are the only ones who are solving this problem that nobody else can solve, because we're the first ones to see it, or we're the first ones to see how to solve it. Yeah. And it's funny that there's a lot of a lot of people like, well, I'm going to disrupt the market, right? I'm going to be a disruptor. And disruption is really an output or a consequence of actually creating a new market that sucks the old market into it, right? Like a lot of the category creation, the best category creation you look at through that lens is they created not just a better product, created an altogether new category, and in doing so, subsume the old market, right? And made the new category equal what the old market was plus that category potential, right? And that's what I think a lot of like, if a misnomer's of founders going into a place like, well, we're going to disrupt this space or disrupt that. I'm like, that really, yeah, that's a great outcome to have, but you don't disrupt, you create and the disruption happens as a result of that creation, right? Yeah, I think that's a big misnomer is that how we can disrupt, I'm going to innovate something cool and clever that's really going to make this faster or better. And that's still that's not going to have the outcome of true disruption. True disruption is fundamentally sort of shift from one market to another one. Yeah, and also that true disruption too can happen at all kinds of different scales. So you're talking about like enormous category that's going to be macro and huge, but you can also talk about a niche category that's going to make sense for a certain group of customers that's critical in terms of volume and has a high, like I said, category of potential, but it might be a small part of something that you can sort of grow into your own category as well. So there's all different ways of thinking about category design as well. Yeah, that's great. I think one of the things too that's really great about the book is just if we could get back to that for a second. Within the book, there's sort of this section where we're going to go through all of the research. Here's what's happening. Here are these sort of five pain points and you can read a lot more of those outtakes and quotes from investors and founders. We talk about the root cause of market myopia, which you really alluded to a lot in this conversation, Jason, and what to do about it. We talk about innovation as almost like a drug, because when you have a really cool innovation, it starts to feel like that's going to be the solution to all of your problems. But as we talked about earlier, often that will generate excitement and it gives you almost like these false positives, almost in a way like a vanity metric of being like, we have all of this great response from our pipeline or prospects or whatever existing customers, but then they don't actually do the thing that you want them to do and why don't they do that? And the answer comes back to what we were just talking about because it's not solving a different problem than what they're already solving. So people come in and say, hey, we are problem-based selling, but the problem that you're solving has already been solved by your competitors. So you're not, that's not a problem anymore if it's been solved. So we go into that, but then we have a self-assessment within the book where founders can figure out what level of my market myopia do I have? How bad is this problem here? And then the next question is, well, what do you do about this? And we've talked a bunch about category design and category design is fundamentally set up to solve this problem of market myopia and those symptoms that we talked about. And so within the book, we have some worksheets that founders can get through to sort of get a start on their category. And so there's really, I think we're not just sort of saying, hey, here's the problem, we're giving people the tools to understand how the problem is affecting their enterprise and then what they can actually start to do about it. And we're doing this all for how many thousands of dollars do you have to pay to get this thing? Yeah, no, we're interested in growing the category of category design. So this is no thousands of dollars. People can get this book for free. It's at the playbigger.com/foundersworkbook is where it is on our website. And they can download it. And then to get those other two, the self assessment and the worksheets, you just have to fill out like your email and you can get that. That's great. Yeah, and I think our intention, you're right, is how do we empower more people? Like in the spirit of the original book, play bigger, right, was how do we put not just the theory and philosophy of category design, but actually the process in place. And this is just yet another tool and really focused on that earlier stage company to empower them. But I think it applies, certainly the worksheets apply to all facets of companies. And I think the end, it's also a call or a flag in the ground on like, hey, we're also here to help as you go through this, right? It's not something that you can just do overnight. It does take time. It is a long journey. There is a strategic component of which I think the worksheets do a great job of outlining. How do you step through some of those strategic steps? But how do you then sort of jump in the water and make the swim to the island, right? How do you really start to navigate, you know, the world and reorient your thinking and your company and their thinking around creation versus competing? Yeah. And I think that's a great point too. And actually one of the questions I would ask you is like, you've been here a year longer than I have. And the sort of evolution, we talked about the evolution actually of play bigger and how our focus had been primarily in a growth stage companies. And that still is a huge part of what we do. But there are all kinds of different sort of ways that we now work with companies to help with, you know, hey, we're always here to help you. And there are a bunch of different ways. And it's not always the sort of standard model. I wonder if you can share a little bit more on that. Yeah. And when I started, there was there was a hunch that Al had on like a, you know, traditionally we primarily focus in a sweet spot for play bigger. We've done some stuff outside of that box, worked with public companies or worked with smaller companies. But generally, a lot of the work was in that growth stage BC on up company. But there was always like a belief that, hey, there's way too much demand coming in from these other types of companies, like asking for help for us not to start to think about how do we apply the process to those stages of companies. So over the years, we really and really you coming in helped sort of validate sort of what we moved from this idea of therapy. How do we help smaller companies in a way that makes sense? They needed a lot of earlier stage companies and founders were coming to us with this problem of like, hey, I'm DIY in it, right? I'm trying to do this myself, but I'm stuck here. And we would try to get them unstuck with what we called therapy. But what we found is that it's still only got them unstuck with that step and not through the gate on actually creating a new category, at least in the way that we measure the success and creation of categories and the bar we set for ourselves. So went back to the drawing board and we invented this thing called Ignite, really taking them through the exact rigor and process we take all of our companies through late stage on. But we were able to lean into things that we have an advantage with to actually make it in a package that's digestible for that stage of company. And that means at that stage, you don't have nearly the the stakeholder baggage and decisions that you made. So there's not as many people to navigate, you can make decisions faster. You can move faster through the process because the fidelity on the output doesn't need to be as tight. You need to actually drive that fidelity on the point of view, the blueprint, the problem, the solution, the category name through actually deployment. That's not necessarily true with later stage, they haven't got to get it right. So we got to iterate on that a little bit more. And then you don't have nearly a decision baggage that you have in a later stage company. You're still early on in product. You don't have to unwrap and re-wrap that. We can start to say, okay, how do we build from here? And so Ignite really is this great tool that has the rigor of all the process that we've built up over the years around category design. And it's what's even better is the outcomes. The outcomes sing for themselves. They speak for themselves. They really reinforce that, okay, this was the right decision. We need to come alongside these founders just as much as we do our later stage or even our CEO and their teams at the public companies. And we've got some great anecdotal stuff in our testimonials from our early Ignite founders. But a lot of people in the space are founders in the space that are looking to do this type of work. And so it just continues to be validated with each Ignite project that we take on. Yeah, Ignite is sort of like everything you need as an early stage founder and nothing that you don't. And so what's always surprising to me is when we work with these later stage growth companies or even public companies, probably more so with the public companies, the amount of change management that goes into that kind of work in order to make it successful, we have to be involved in that and sort of key drivers of it for those companies. It's critically important. And it's something that we've integrated into our processes for those later stage companies. But for the early stage company, it doesn't really, it's not even a thing in a lot of these companies who might just be four or five people. You don't need a change management. There's four people that have to be bought in. And those are the same people who are probably designing the category. And then even if you're bigger than that, the change management piece is much sort of more manageable. But the idea then that you have a single song sheet that you're singing off of for product development, for marketing, and how you're sort of going to market sales, and then also like employee onboarding, you're getting this sort of real complete sense of identity for the company through the category design. So the category is not only going to help you solve this different problem for customers, it's going to help you articulate that in a very clear way with all of the right language. And so even in this book, when we heard from people who are like, we are different, but nobody's allowing us to sort of reach that potential. They keep putting us in this box. The reason they're putting you in that box is you're not giving them the architecture and the mental scaffolding and the language to be able to talk about what this new category, frankly, is. And so by doing the category design, you sort of resolve all of those problems at once, which is why it can be so powerful, and which is why it can be the antidote to those sort of five issues I talked about at the very beginning. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and we talk a lot about how do you establish that taxonomy, the languages, all that stuff is really important. And what's great is, is, you know, there is these outputs that do have it does have an impact on, and you kind of got into that it does allow you to sort of talk about an onboard and scale, you know, solve these problems. But we also talk about like, it has an impact on for companies at that stage, like the investor deck, just simple things like that, like it becomes much more clear and much more compelling, right? You lead with the problem, you scope the size of the problem, that gives belief on a TAM or what we call category potential that investors like, yeah, I want to invest in a category size opportunity, not in a company size opportunity, right? Yeah, so I think that things like that that are the outputs, they're a little bit like that really have a downstream impact of the category work are really important to companies at the earlier stage. And maybe not so like for, you know, later stage or pre IPO, it really is about the S one, right? And it does have the category work has a huge impact on that. But for earlier stage, what are some of the other things that that start to become clear, right? It's the sales become clear replication of the sales team, onboarding, and like you've mentioned of new employees and actually recruiting and getting people to buy into this. Hey, I see where they're going. I see the value that they're going to create over time. And I want to be a part of that. We're the first company to solve this problem. And we've created this category that has this market potential. And you can be a part of that for a top tier candidate that you're trying to attract to your company. I mean, that's really that's what people are looking for. If you're going to work with an early stage company, you're working because of that potential. You can get paid more somewhere else. You can have job security somewhere else. What is it that you're that you're going there for? And it is that, you know, moonshot and that's, you know, category design can help you organize, you know, your your what you've already developed from a company and a product side or are developing in those two sort of legs of the triangle category design can help you sort of organize all of that in a way that is going to allow you to talk about it that way and then ultimately achieve it. Yeah, it works with with sales too, right? It's like a lot of those those initial sales are not just buying what you're doing today, but they're buying the fact that you're solving this problem for them and where you're going that you're going to eventually solve it holistically, right? So there's this there's this amazing thing that happens in the sales process when you start to orient around the category of work is like, oh, yeah, I'm going to buy you today. So I have optionality on where you're going. Yeah, I believe you can help me today, but where you're going is way more valuable. And that's that that's a shift in, you know, customers as well in their mindset. We've seen it happen time and time again with with our companies. Yeah, it is interesting to me, like from this perspective, and it makes sense for early stage companies, but also for later stage companies, the sort of I would say like adjacent impact and adjacent problems that category design can solve. So take a CMO who's coming into a new role in the CEO, CEO says to the CMO, we need a unified voice. We need to go to market strategy. We need to understand. We need people to understand exactly who we are when we communicate. Your job is to come up with our brand vision voice identity, you know, problem, I'm sorry, mission, all that kind of stuff. That is a huge task for a CMO and can be daunting and very difficult. It is a sort of, I was going to say byproduct, but it is a feature of category design that that gets developed in the. So it solves that CMO problem. You just talked about like the CRO problem of like, how do you, you know, unify your sales team. So everybody's able to sort of make the most out of what this company is and pitch that, you know, higher value contract or whatever it is that you're selling in a way that's going to be the most effective. And it helps to solve that from a product standpoint, you know, CPO, like, what should we be innovating? What does that product blueprint look like? And I think you've got that now as part of the category design. So as a, as a late stage company, that's really helpful. But as an early stage company, where you may not have these individuals yet working for your company, and that may make the most sense, you know, CMO might be a hire that you have later down the, down the line. But you can have that sort of marketing voice because it is baked into the category. Yeah. And I think it's, it's, we've, I always talk about it has, especially these early stage companies that they are, they have this ocean to boil on front of them. Like they're, they're at the starting line of their company creation, their product creation, and they see this massive thing they have to do. And what are the first steps to take? How do I prioritize? What do I prioritize? How do I give focus to all those components of my business as I bring them on or as they're already there, right? And I think that's what you just kind of described is, you know, the CMO has that their own little ocean to boil, right? When they come in, but when you have this focusing function of the point of view and say, no, just operationalize the point of view, it's, it's, it's a sigh really, because then you're like, oh, it's, it clearly, that's, that's, that's a clear path. But also, it's a pack that has near-term impact, right? Yeah. When you start to evangelize the problems, we talk a lot about how that changes the minds of the people that you're trying to change, right? How do you change the minds of your customers, your prospective employees, et cetera, right? And all of a sudden now customer urgency becomes more, like the fact that you have customer urgency becomes more pronounced because you've identified this problem that's costing your customers money. And there's no other way to solve it, but what you've sort of identified, resource misallocation becomes less prominent because you know what you're driving towards. The difficulty in customer acquisition becomes less difficult because people are hearing about this problem and starting to understand that, hey, there's a company that does something about this. The scaling challenges, we talked about, you know, you're able to convince those high caliber hires that this is the place to be. And the investor's skepticism changes because your investor deck has changed to focus on category potential in addition to TAM and the fact that you have a unique point of view and perspective that nobody else has. And that is something that people want to invest in, you know? So that's the sort of net takeaway of the book. And I think one of the great lessons for us in terms of how we can solve some of these problems for earlier stage founders. No, I think it's a great tool. It's a great asset. I'm really proud of the work that we've done that you've led. It's really powerful. And I think it's overdue for this cohort of founders, right? This stage of company. And so having something out there that really does focus on them and give them a little bit more application to their circumstance, I think, is pretty cool. Yeah. And one more time people could get it at playbigger.com/foundersworkbook. For more info about Play Bigger and all things category design, please visit playbigger.com. Thanks for listening.