Dual-Track Category Building (Sell Into Today's Budget, Build Tomorrow's Category)
Rank in the funded category you already fit while running a long-tail campaign to shift the market to your new one
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Category creation is not a binary switch. Gago's answer to the 'existing category vs. new category' false choice is to run both simultaneously: keep categorizing, ranking, and selling inside the category buyers already budget for, while separately investing in thought leadership, PR, and analyst education for the category you want to exist in three years. Revenue comes from today's budget line; the category comes from the long tail.
Origin
Barbra Gago's approach at Pando (selling into 'Performance Management' while building 'employee progression') and at Miro (continuing to optimize for the whiteboarding/diagramming categories while establishing 'visual collaboration').
Core principles
- 01Sell where the budget is; educate where the vision is.
- 02The category you claim in directories and sales decks does not have to be the category you claim in your thought leadership.
- 03A new category is a long-tail strategy — you work your way up to owning it over years, not launch into it.
- 04Optimizing for the existing category is not a betrayal of the new one; it funds it.
How to run it
- 1
Identify the funded category you technically fit
Find the established category with a real line item on the buyer's budget that your product legitimately belongs to — Performance Management for Pando, whiteboarding/diagramming for Miro.
- 2
Keep ranking and selling in it
Categorize yourself in directory sites under the funded category, talk about it, and sell to companies actively shopping in it. Do not withdraw from the category while the new one is immature.
Pro tip Directory rankings in the funded category keep inbound demand flowing while the new category has zero search volume.
- 3
Name the gap between the old category and what you actually do
Articulate precisely how you differ from the traditional category — Pando's 'employee progression' exists because it fixes the systemic problems traditional Performance Management perpetuates.
Pro tip The new category name should describe the differences, not just be a fresher-sounding synonym.
Watch out If you cannot name a substantive difference, you do not have a new category — you have a tagline.
- 4
Run the long-tail education campaign in parallel
Commit sustained investment in content, thought leadership, PR, and analyst relationships around the new concept, with the explicit goal of shifting buyer mindset over time rather than converting deals this quarter.
Watch out The investment is high. Only commit if you are prepared to fund content and thought leadership for years.
- 5
Migrate as the market moves
As other companies adopt the language and analysts create the classification, progressively shift your primary positioning to the new category and let the old one become a secondary box you also tick.
Pro tip Miro still ticked the boxes for other categories long after visual collaboration became its headline.
In the wild
Pando technically fits Performance Management, a category with an established budget line. Rather than refusing that label, Gago ranks Pando in Performance Management directories, talks about Performance Management, and sells to buyers shopping for it — while simultaneously publishing thought leadership on 'employee progression' as the thing that fixes what performance reviews break.
→ Pando converts existing budget today while building the appetite for a category it intends to own later, explicitly describing it as working its way up over time rather than a switch.
Gago contrasts Miro (kept optimizing for whiteboarding and diagramming while gradually assembling 'visual collaboration' from how users actually described their jobs to be done) with the marketing automation era, where Eloqua, Marketo, and peers had no progressive build-up — the category simply was marketing automation and everyone educated the market top-down at once.
→ The dual-track bottoms-up approach mirrored Miro's bottoms-up business model, whereas top-down category creation only works when an inflection point makes the whole market shift at once.
Common mistakes
Treating it as one or the other
Founders assume they must either be the best ATS or refuse to be an ATS. The middle ground — sell into the funded category, educate toward the new one — is usually the correct play.
Underestimating the investment
Even the dual-track version demands sustained time, thought leadership, and content spend. Attempting it without that commitment produces a slogan nobody adopts.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders whose product genuinely differs from an established, budgeted category and who want revenue now without abandoning a long-term category ambition
Not ideal for
Markets hitting a sharp inflection point where the whole industry shifts at once and a top-down, all-in category push (like marketing automation) is the faster path
From the transcript
“Performance Management is a very established category that we technically fit into and also there's a line item on the budget and people have money…”
“while we want to educate the market and build this new category of employee progression because it's related to the differences between what we're doing…”
“it's not necessarily one or the other but I do say the investment is high if you want to build a new category”
From the episode
Category creation and brand building
Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)