Category Thinkers

There's plenty of examples of founders, obsessed with a problem, applying category design to build their business and dominate their market.

But realistically, most people that first encounter category design are not in the founding stages of their company. 

That's why talking to the CEO of a publicly traded company that decided to apply category design to reinvent his company after 25 years will give you the insights you may need to apply category thinking in your business.

Carl Daikeler is that CEO. His company, BODi, has revolutionized home fitness for the last 25 years with products like P90x and Insanity, but recently found themselves in a comparison trap when entering the digital landscape.  
 
That's when he found the mental scaffolding of category design, and is now designing a completely new category around fitness called, health esteem.

In this episode you'll learn about:

• What it looks like to have a CEO and company obsessed with a problem they need to solve
• How BODi has leaned into their superconsumers in 3 different ways to get big results
• Why Carl feels like the category design work is just beginning for his BODi and what the risks of poor implementation are

Your hosts today are John Rougeux and Pablo Gonzalez (connect with them on LinkedIn!)

If you want to stop just listening and join the conversation, join our community at CategoryThinkers.com

You can read the books, and listen to all the podcasts about Category Design, but nothing beats learning from the experience of someone currently in the trenches of designing a new category.

That's why we wanted to pull the curtain back on what it feels like to be actively designing a category as a startup founder/CEO with Hannah Grady Williams, Founder of d'Skills.

After a TEDx Talk and best-selling book led to a thriving consulting business, Hannah decided to design a new category of education for Gen Z...

So she founded a company called d’Skills and even recruited Christopher Lochhead to her board.

Join the co-founders and ambassadors of the Category Thinkers Community, John Rougeux and Pablo Gonzalez, to pick Hannah's brain about:

• Why she decided to play bigger and design a category
• How she spends her time as a founder in the middle of a category design
• What she did to monetize her idea before the category is ready to emerge
• How often she iterates on her category language and strategy

This was recorded as part of a Category Thinkers Community AMA so you'll hear questions from our community being incorporated into the conversation.

If you want to be part of our next online event, join our community at CategoryThinkers.com!

Sponsors for this episode are:

Category Design Advisors
BeTheStage.live

Bill Macaitis is the former CMO then CRO of Slack, CMO of Zen Desk, and SVP of Marketing at SalesForce and in this conversation we dive deep into what made Slack the category king of team collaboration tools it has become.

You'll notice that most of this story took place before Play Bigger was even written so this was intuitive category design by Bill and his team, and you'll have a chance to see:

• How Bill thinks about the way category design and product led growth work together within a go to market strategy
• Why  Slack never focused on their competitors and chose to focus on their consumers instead
• What Sketchers, Crocs, and Slack all have in common
• And more!

This is a conversation between Bill, and the co-founders of the Category Thinkers:
Mike Damphousse
John Rougeux
Pablo Gonzalez

Stop just listening in and join the daily category design dialogue inside our free community at CategoryThinkers.com

Category Thinking is everywhere, and your ability to identify it in the wild will sharpen your skillset as a category designer.

And in this episode of #CategoriesInTheWild, we'll examine WWE's development of the "sports entertainment" category. It's a perfect case study that every category designer should learn from.

Join John Rougeux and Pablo Gonzalez in their conversation with Rajiv "Rajnation" Nathan as they explore why the WWE is one of the best modern examples of category design. They'll discuss: 

• How new language was used to differentiate WWE from other forms of wrestling and even other sports.
• Why Wrestlemania was such an effective lightning strike and helped establish WWE as a staple of American culture.
• How changes in the technology allowed WWE to develop an entirely new different distribution channel and reach people at scale.

About our special guest:

Rajiv "Rajnation" Nathan is the founder and  Chief Pitch Artist of Startup Hypeman, a Category Thinkers Community Ambassador, MMA ringside announcer, and pro wrestling aficionado.

When we saw Raj's LinkedIn post about how the WWE used category thinking to develop a multi-billion dollar organization, we knew he'd be the perfect addition to this conversation.

To participate in our live podcasts and events, join our community for free at CategoryThinkers.com.

When founders first start considering a category strategy, they spend a lot of time bouncing ideas back and forth to develop a point of view.

That can feel great or it can feel like a battle, but it's impossible to know if it's productive until they share it with someone else to see if it resonates.

But how should the conversation go?  How do you know if you're making progress? How do you know if you should really pursue a category strategy?

That's why we decided to produce an entirely new type of episode of this podcast that we're calling a "Category Jam",  where we showcase these types of conversations.

Josh Roenitz and Kim Bach are the co-founders of DailyHuman, a company working on  problems in the workplace coming from a change in work, and a generational change in humans.

On this call, they're talking to Category Thinkers co-founders, Mike Damphousse and John Rougeux, to:

• See if it's worth it for them to pursue a category strategy
• Iron out a point of view
• Get help with a category name
• and more!

Listen along as Pablo Gonzalez narrates parts of the conversation, and let us know what your takeaways are inside our free community at CategoryThinkers.com

Mark Kilens has built a career as a marketing leader and category designer with HubSpot and Drift. Now, he's the CMO at Airmeet, the company behind Event-Led Growth.

In this conversation, we break down what Mark's learned as a category designer, including:

• How to wrap your category in a familiar context to help buyers understand it.
• Mark's 3 step framework for developing category language.
• Why category design needs to be led by a CEO who can keep the team focused on the category strategy.

To participate in our live podcasts and events, join our community for free at CategoryThinkers.com.

When Apple launched the Vision Pro, it wasn't just a product launch, it was the launch of a new category called "spatial computing." 

But did Apple get everything right? 

They did a lot of things well, but we think Apple had a couple misses, too. Join us as we deconstruct Apple's newest category launch and discuss what we might have done differently.

In this #CategoriesInTheWild episode, we'll cover: 

• What Apple did differently from Meta
• The problem of "leaving out the problem" 
• Who Apple's REAL target audience for the announcement was

About our special guest: 

Mike Damphousse scoured LinkedIn to figure out which member of our community had the most insightful post and invite them onto the stage. 

That honor went to Jordy Van de Locht, Fractional CMO and Category Designer at Boil.

This was recorded as a live episode with the Category Thinkers community. To participate in future shows, join our community at CategoryThinkers.com.

One of the biggest reasons we knew the world needed the Category Thinkers Community (apart from our own desire to talk category strategy all day) is that there are many misconceptions about the discipline of category design, and who it's for.

In fact, the term "category thinking", expands the tent on category design in a way that allows us to use it more freely in our efforts to create businesses, careers, or social impact. Where category design was the discipline we all flocked to, category thinking is the daily muscle memory that brings categories to life.

That's why we brought the inimitable godfather of category design, Christopher Lochhead, to talk about:

• why there is an  increasing rate of category design successes 
• how to convince a CEO that category design is for them
• what "small 'e' entrepreneurs" seem to understand that  "Big 'E' entrepreneurs" keep getting wrong
• and much more!

As soon as you're ready to stop just listening to this podcast and join the conversation, join our free community at CategoryThinkers.com and help end Category Isolation!

The discipline of category design was formally launched seven years ago with the book, Play Bigger. If you were paying attention, it predicted what was coming – that in the next six to ten years, category design would tip into the mainstream.

That’s why on category design’s seventh birthday, we decided to reunite three co-authors of Play Bigger (Christopher Lochhead, Al Ramadan, Kevin Maney). In this episode, they look back at the birth of the discipline, map out the current lay of the land, and paint a vision of a rich future for category designers. We conclude with an AMA session with the Category Thinkers Community.
We hit on:

• How they set out to establish a discipline instead of sharing an idea (and why it worked)
• What each of their approaches to establishing a POV looks like and how they’ve evolved
• Failures in category design and how to avoid them
• And much more, all wrapped up in legendary behind the scene stories of bringing the book to life

If you want to be a part of the next conversation, join the community for category designers at CategoryThinkers.com

This isn't just a podcast.  

It's the launch of a community.  

A different community dedicated to the understanding and application of category design.

Naturally, we're kicking it off with our POV.

If you are a category designer looking for a band of pirates to be a part of...

If you are category curious and looking to become category capable...

If you know different beats better...

Join the community at CategoryThinkers.com