The Category Creation Formula: Discover, Design, and Win New Market Categories

Innovative concepts, tools, and playbooks for discovering, defining, and taking charge of new market categories, by two of the leaders of the category design movement.

The most exciting—and often most valuable—companies create, develop and win new categories of products or services. Examples range from the Zamboni company a century ago to OpenAI today. It also includes startups that you may not have heard of yet, but will as their categories take off.

Category creation and development should be the goal of any company that wants to make a difference. And the way to achieve that is through the discipline of strategic category design.

Kevin Maney helped introduce category design in the bestseller Play Bigger. Now, he and Mike Damphousse—an experienced CEO, investor, and marketing executive—share the secrets that they’ve learned over the past decade, plus new concepts and tools that help companies see and frame new categories. Their advisory firm has worked on strategic category design projects with more than fifty companies and guided workshops for hundreds more at incubators and VC portfolio gatherings.

The Category Creation Formula reveals the processes they rely on and the truths about categories that they’ve uncovered, clearly laid out so any entrepreneur or leadership team can benefit from them, too.

Kevin Maney is a bestselling author, award-winning commentator and a founding partner of Category Design Advisors. He co-authored Play Bigger, which has influenced company strategy throughout the technology ecosystem. His past books include the national bestseller The Transformation Principles and the New York Times bestseller The Two-Second Advantage and The Maverick and His Machine. He has written for USA Today, Newsweek, Fortune, The Atlantic, and Wired, and often appears on radio and television. He lives in New York.

Mike Damphousse brings an experienced, pragmatic aspect to strategic category design from three decades as a company founder, CEO, CMO, startup advisor and a limited partner with Stage 2 Capital. He was most recently founder and CEO/CMO of Green Leads, which was acquired by Next 15. He has served on several boards of both commercial and non-profit ventures, and speaks regularly at conferences such as Dreamforce and Inbound. Mike holds a BS in Computer Science from Merrimack College and has three daughters, two granddaughters, and a grandson. He lives on the water in both New Hampshire and Florida with his wife and business partner, Linda.