If you don’t define your category, someone else will

In crowded markets, especially in tech and fintech, being “better” isn’t enough. 

You need to be different – and the most powerful way to do that is to define a category you can own.

When you create or claim a category, you stop competing purely on features and start shaping the rules of the game. You become the reference point others are compared to.

Why category creation matters
Without a defined category, your product gets shoved into whatever box the market already understands. That usually means being judged against incumbents with bigger budgets, more brand awareness, and established trust. It’s also a box you might not want to be in.

With a category, you shift the frame. Suddenly, you’re not one of many — you’re the one who made the box in the first place.

Currencycloud: owning “embedded finance”
Back in 2019, Currencycloud could have positioned itself as just another cross-border payments platform. Instead, they claimed and consistently reinforced the idea of embedded finance.

It wasn’t just a label – it was a vision of how financial services would increasingly live inside other platforms, quietly powering transactions behind the scenes. They wove it into media interviews, investor decks, keynote talks, and customer conversations.

By the time Visa acquired them in 2021, Currencycloud wasn’t competing in the crowded “FX and payments” space. They were embedded finance.

Other category shapers

• Gong didn’t just sell conversation analytics; they created “revenue intelligence.”
• Snowflake didn’t push “cloud data storage” – they led with “data cloud” as a transformative category.
• HubSpot turned “inbound marketing” into an industry-defining movement.

In each case, the company’s growth was fuelled not just by product innovation, but by narrative ownership.

How to start defining yours

1. Spot the shift – what big market change or customer behaviour is emerging that you can name and own?
2. Name it clearly – use language that is memorable, visual, and instantly understood.
3. Repeat it relentlessly – from your homepage to every Substack or podcast appearance, make it the anchor of your story.

At Rowntree², we help tech and fintech start-ups and scale-ups move from competing in an existing box to creating one of their own.

Because if you don’t define your category, someone else will – and you’ll be left playing by their rules.