The business world is starting to realize branding comes second to category design.
No meaningful category?
No meaningful company.
In The Category Design Toolkit, you’ll learn about 15 absolutely mind-altering frameworks for how to see business, life, and the way people organize information into "categories" in their minds. Are you a B2B enterprise software company? Do you sell plastic widgets on Amazon? Maybe you're a small business owner, a biotech entrepreneur, or a YouTuber. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do. In order to have a meaningful impact on the world, in order to become known for a niche you own, and in order to dominate your industry in a way that separates you from any and all competition, you must create your own category.
That means you must learn the skill of category design.
In this book, you will learn:
- How to objectively measure whether you and your company are creating a new category versus competing in someone else's (existing) category.
- How to prosecute The Magic Triangle: product design, company/business model design, and category design.
- How to find your Superconsumers, and leverage Superconsumer data to discover new potential categories.
- How to engineer a category breakthrough (even if you think your industry is "too saturated" or "all the good ideas are taken").
- The importance of being a missionary versus a mercenary—and why mercenary entrepreneurs and executives unknowingly compete over 24% of the market.
- The 8 category differentiation levers, and all the ways you can create a defensible moat around your business.
- How you can apply category creation & category design principles even as a small "e" entrepreneur or local business owner.
- How category design can also be applied to your career (and why you should aim to become known for a niche you own, not "build a personal brand).
- What happens if you neglect your category—and how to rage category violence industry leaders who make this mistake.
- How to write a legendary S-1 and raise hundreds of millions (even billions) of dollars in your company's IPO by making a case for the future growth of your category (which you created & designed).
- Why "Blue Ocean" isn't what you are looking for. And if you want to truly create a category of your own, you should execute a No Ocean Strategy.
This book is a good introduction to the frameworks you need to start learning and practicing the skill of category design.