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The Category Design Toolkit & A Marketer’s Guide To Category Design
I just published 2 new Category Pirates books!
ARRRRRR!!!!!
3 years ago, almost to the day, I started writing these books on Category Design with two other collaborators (and brilliant business thinkers).
Pirate Christopher had already written a book called Play Bigger.
Pirate Eddie had already written a book called Superconsumers.
And I had already written a book called The Art & Business of Online Writing.
But even 3–5 years ago, the subject of category design was relatively new. Very few people were talking about it, and even fewer understood how to execute it. And the unfortunate truth was, almost anytime we heard someone declare themselves an expert in category creation or category design, what we found instead was just the regurgitation of business clichés that we new, for a fact, were either wrong or massively conflated (“Building an authentic brand is all that matters!”).
So, we set out to educate people.
Our mission was to build the category of Category Design.
For the first 2 years, we went through rewrite after rewrite.
Us three pirates would have weekly Zoom calls, and on occasion would fly into SFO for a compressed in-person work session, to work on the material.
We racked up hundreds of hours of recordings.
We wrote and rewrote the same frameworks, stories, and insights to stress-test our thinking.
We even created multiple versions of the book, trying to figure out the best structure and format for all different types of readers.
Until eventually, we realized we were going about things all wrong.
It took us 2 years to realize we weren’t just writing one book. If we really believed category design to be the most powerful business skill on the planet, then we were going to write dozens and dozens…
