Barbra Gago

When you're thinking about category creation, it's really, for us, it was really about the scope of what we're trying to do and not wanting to be in something too small.

Instead of spending the time and money to build a new category, we were going to spend the time and money to elevate the value of this category. So rather than changing the category to something else which we could value at whatever it was, we were just going to spend all of our resources to make this whole category much more valuable to the users, to companies.

Can this be a big company with that name? At some point, can it be as big as we want it to be, as we think it can be with that name?

You're not building a category until there is competition. It's not officially actually a category until there's more companies that do that. And that was a big learning for me in this whole process of category creation, is that it's actually okay when new companies come in that say they're that category because it's just validating the fact that there is a new category.

When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership like why is this the category? What are the unique value propositions of this particular thing? What are the pain points it solves? And then of course, getting a lot of content around because when you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that.

One thing that's really important in category creation as well is actually PR. You need to get this category and positioning out there at a high level in order to test it out and see if it makes sense and if it's resonating.

You need to build relationships with them. You need to work with them to create your category as well. So with the visual collaboration, for example, we weren't ranking, we weren't categorized in visual collaboration on G2 Crowd, and we had to meet with them and explain what it was and talk to them about the differentiation of this category versus other categories in terms of features and all of that stuff so that they could understand how they would differentiate this category from another category.

If you really don't fit into any other category, then you probably do need to figure out what the category is and package that. And that's going to be done mostly by continuing to talk to customers and listening to how they talk about things. It all comes from what you hear from them ultimately and what will resonate.

All of my best marketing and positioning literally comes from having a million conversations with customers and listening to how they solve problems and how our system helps them solve problems and what they're doing and how they talk about stuff.

I think the sooner, the better like rebrand before I even joined. Will they let me change the name was my criteria for joining. And I would say in general, the sooner, the better, but obviously after you know that you have product market fit and you have something to scale, so you don't want to invest too much in a brand that isn't going to get you as far as you want to get if you're going to obviously scale.

Opinionated software is basically software platforms that essentially have either best practices or maybe some rules integrated into the system. You have systems that you can customize any which way and however you want and then you have other systems that enforce a certain way of behaving or doing work.

I think there's two different approaches. Either find a process that just doesn't have technology that is a best practice or growing best practice. I think the same thing happened in DevOps with many different tools. And then Greenhouse, which is more like, what are companies missing? How can they do it better? How can we train them and teach them a better way? And then by the way, our software helps you do that.