How Successful Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Space in Their Market

Reading this amazing book made me consider the highly effective ways that entrepreneurs think and behave.

In my review on Amazon I wrote, “This is the first truly exciting marketing book I’ve read in a very long time.”

It’s true, The Category Design Toolkit — Beyond Marketing: 15 Frameworks For Creating & Dominating Your Niche is a really exciting and inspiring read.

Let me tell you why I find this book so exciting and how it will greatly enhance the chances of success of wannabe entrepreneurs.

I gave up buying books written by theorists and professors a long time ago. Now I only read the thoughts and words of winners with skin in the game. I want to know why they actually do what they do and how they make it work.

I bought this book because it is narrated by:

Nicolas Cole has started three successful businesses. He is a top content creator with thousands of published articles, many of which have gone viral with over a million views. He writes in magazines like Time, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider and Inc. He is also the author of two Amazon bestsellers, one of which The Art and Business of Online writing is my personal bible for online content creation.

Christopher Lockhead is “One of the best minds in marketing,” according to The Marketing Journal. He was the CMO of three Silicon Valley public companies. He is a best-selling Amazon author and number one Apple podcaster.

Eddie Yoon “has written more on category strategy for Harvard Business Review than any other person.” He was a senior partner at The Cambridge Group, a strategy consulting firm. He founded the think tank EddieWould Grow LLC to advise firms on growth strategy. In the past two decades, Eddie’s work has driven over $8 billion of annual incremental growth.

For my money, these are guys who have something valuable to offer.

How Category Design opens the money floodgates

As I read the book I realised that category design is what successful entrepreneurs have been doing since the beginning of time — they just didn’t call it category design.

What many successful entrepreneurs do is create a new position in an existing market. And they also create a new gateway into that market.

Entrepreneurs recognise that the hardest thing to do is to create a market. Trying to persuade people to buy something they’ve never heard of, don’t know how to use and can’t see the value of is hard expensive work.

But showing people a new and exciting way to solve an existing problem or how to get more out of something they already enjoy is exploiting a market that already exists.

What Steve Jobs actually did

In 1997 when Steve Jobs was brought back into the ailing Apple business he’d founded in 1976 he set about searching for a product to exploit an existing market.

The iPod portable music player was Jobs’s way into the huge market for portable music which was then dominated by the Sony Walkman. Then, once he’d found his gateway, he quickly followed up with iTunes.

Jobs then used the huge profits from his music business to expand his “i” product range into iPhones, iPads, iCloud and iWatches. He even rebranded his desktop computer by calling it the iMac to complete a range of information and entertainment creation, transmission and storage products.

The point to note about the expansion of Apple is that it is based on exploiting existing markets by finding new ways to capture the audiences already there.

What Elon Musk did

Elon Musk probably looked at the automobile market and thought to himself, “the manufacturers in this market are old and tired. But they have educated their consumers to be on the constant lookout for new and better autos”.

So he decided to buy into the fledgling Tesla motor company in 2004. His aim was to give consumers a radically different auto in a radically different way. He would provide an all-electric car. AND he would also control as much of the supply chain as possible. In particular, he would manufacture his own batteries. He would also supply direct to consumers without any middle-man dealerships.

It was a bold strategy, but the boldness has paid off. According to Car Dealer Magazine Tesla sold 936,000 cars in 2021. And Bloomberg stated in their October 2021 report that the Tesla Model 3 was the top-selling vehicle in Europe that month,

How to become a category pirate

To build your own unique category in the market of your choice here’s what you should do:

• Look for a market that interests you and which has a problem or which has matured. The maturity or the problem is the weak spot. Category Pirates look for weak spots.
• Make up your mind that you will never look for a safe way to achieve your goals.
• Decide that you are going to radically change the way things currently exist in the market you are going to tackle.
• Make no attempt to copy the way others behave in your target market. Develop a strong, unique point of view about your approach to the market.
• Have courage and be prepared to take risks to break moulds.
• Find a new way to exploit the wants, needs or desires of the consumers in that market.
• Put yourself into the mind of a typical consumer in the market you want to exploit and focus on what could happen in that category to excite them.

You don’t have to think big

In the mid-90s I broke into the corporate training market by offering something radically different.

I recognised that managers have little time to go on lengthy training courses. I also knew from personal experience that many management training courses were padded out to increase the appearance of value. The annoying consequence of these extended courses was that much of what was taught was of little or no immediate value to the manager attending the course.

You could say that my personal point of view was that much management training wasted managers’ time because it was not tailored to the specific needs of individual managers. I saw individual coaching by an experienced manager as a valuable and stimulating alternative.

I founded Personal Performance Coaching Ltd. to offer confidential, tailor-made coaching for middle and senior managers with issues in leadership, communication and personal development. And I offered the coaching on-site, in short, one-hour sessions.

For participating coachees, it was like “going to a meeting that’s solely about finding solutions to the issues I am facing today”.

A chapter for Small “e” Entrepreneurs

You may want to start reading The Category Design Toolkit at chapter 10 which begins by posing the questions, “How do I create a category if I’m not a heavily funded startup or some massively successful company? How can someone like me create a category of my own?”

I won’t spoil your fun by giving you the answer here. In any case, I couldn’t answer these questions nearly as well as the highly experienced authors. All I can say is that the authors state, “Anyone can do it, at any stage in their life.”