Blinkist distills the key insights of 2 000+ bestselling nonfiction books into powerful 15-minute reads or listens for your mobile device. One of the most exciting things you can do as an entrepreneur is create an entirely new product category. Some of the world’s most successful companies owe their success to the fact that they did not focus on incremental innovation but succeeded in creating, building, and converting people to a brand new market space ✈️ Creating a new category is incredibly hard. So the question is: how can you do it and make it stick? ✅ In this talk, Niklas provides actionable tips to help you: - Build a team culture that focuses on learning - Spot market opportunities and anticipate market changes - Validate your ideas - Convince users to adapt to this category and be catalysts for change

1. — Niklas Jansen 👊
How to build and
market a new
product category

5. These companies are
category creators.
They create new market spaces
through breakthrough innovations.

6. Account of revenue
growth
47 %
53 %
Account of market
capitalisation growth
26 %
74 %
Companies that created a category
Companies that did not create a category
Fortune’s lists of the 100 fastest-growing
U.S. companies from 2009 to 2011

7. „Category creators experience
much faster growth and receive
much higher valuations from
investors than companies
bringing only incremental
innovations to market.“
– Havard Business Review

8. Beyond economics
Category creation may be the most fun
you can have in business

9. It’s like surfing the
unsurfable. 🤙

13. Market opportunity,
yeah!

14. Market opportunity.. Or
a fantasy?

15. The everlasting struggle

17. 100k
paying
subscriber
2mn
registered
users
$17mn
venture capital
raised
200%
y-o-y revenue
growth

18. Seven things we learned.
How to build and
market a new product
category

19. LEARNING #1
Create a culture
of learning

20. Culture > Everything
else

21. #AlwaysLearning

22. Learn to unlearn

23. LEARNING #2
Changes are an
opportunity

24. Understand what drives
change

25. Demo-
graphics
Culture
RegulationTechnology

26. LEARNING #3
Identify the
annoyances society
has accepted

27. Start with the answers

28. Create empathy for
your potential users

29. How do people solve
their problem today?

30. Immerse yourself

31. Collect data points

32. LEARNING #4
¯_(ツ)_/¯

33. Validate your ideas

35. „Guerilla Customer
Development“

36. LEARNING #5
It’s 50/50
product, branding

37. Make it easy to
understand (and still
cool)

39. Establish a frame of
reference
MAYA – “Most Advanced Yet
Acceptable”

40. Creative marketing

41. LEARNING #6
There’s always
competition

42. There’s always a
substitute

43. Competition helps
legitimize a market

44. LEARNING #7
Be foolish 💪

45. „You can't connect the dots
looking forward; you can only
connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots
will somehow connect in your
future.“
– Steve Jobs

46. Surf with us. We’re
hiring. $
@jansenniklas n@blinkist.com