Category creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)

The episode opens with a cold-open excerpt in which Barbra Gago says that building a category requires validation from analysts and directory sites, traction in thought leadership, and a lot of content, because a new category also means educating buyers that they can now budget for it. Lenny then introduces her as a former chief marketing officer and global head of marketing at Miro, a former VP of marketing at Greenhouse, and a former head of marketing at CultureAmp, where, he says, she helped build the go-to-market plan and close the first 50 customers. He says the conversation will cover three topics: creating your own category, building a brand and rebranding, and building opinionated software.

Two sponsor reads follow, both advertisements read by the host: one for AssemblyAI, an API platform for AI models such as transcription and summarization, and one for Stych (spelled this way in the transcript and described as 'stitch with a Y'), an authentication and onboarding platform. The transcript has the host stating a conversion figure of over 60% for the second sponsor's customers; this is an advertiser claim, not part of the guest's argument.

Asked for a short background, Gago says she has spent nearly all of her career in B2B SaaS, often around disruptive technologies in people, tech and the future of work. She says she helped bring CultureAmp and Greenhouse to market, worked on enterprise social networking in the Yammer days, and most recently was CMO at Miro, where she led the rebrand. Her current startup, which the transcript calls Pando, is what she describes as an employee progression platform, aimed at giving leaders structured, transparent tools to coach their teams. She says its large goal is 'killing performance reviews'.

Lenny notes that Miro is credited with inventing what is now called visual collaboration, that CultureAmp helped shape an employee experience category, and that founders often wonder whether to create a category or try to win an existing one. He asks for her decision process at Miro and Greenhouse. Gago says the two are useful contrasts: at Miro the team created a new category, while at Greenhouse they tried and abandoned the attempt.

At Miro, she says the existing label was online whiteboard, a much smaller category that not many people searched for. The motivation for category creation was scope: the team wanted to become something every company needs rather than a small tool used by product teams, engineering teams or schools. She says the platform had so much possibility that she joked the company was an 'ever expanding universe', whereas online whiteboard was too small.

At Greenhouse, she says the applicant tracking system (ATS) category had a bad reputation at the time. She names Jobvite, which she says arrived in the mid-2000s as an improved ATS built around social recruiting, but which was transactional rather than strategic. The company therefore wanted to steer clear of the ATS space even though it was an ATS. She lists the factors she weighs for category creation: whether companies have a budget, the language buyers use to describe their pain points, and whether there is competition. Companies had a budget for ATS; she does not think they had one for visual collaboration at that time.

On competition, she argues against the instinct to create a category to avoid rivals. In her telling, a category does not exist until others join it, and new entrants calling themselves part of it validate it. She also notes that the incumbent category can persist alongside the new one, with the ATS market remaining the ATS market while Miro created visual collaboration and also fits other categories.

It's not officially actually a category until there's more companies that do that.