The Existential Crisis of Software Category Definition

In the mind of the prospect, what category bucket does your software offering fall into? Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

Full disclosure: I am employed at Airtable at the writing of this article.

When I joined Airtable as its first product marketing leader in April of 2020, we had no clear software category and the market described us as a mix of a spreadsheet on steroids, a flexible project management tool, and an app building platform. Even as employees, we could not consistently and confidently answer a simple question: What is Airtable?

When I asked our sales reps how they answered the question in front of customers, the most common response was a smile and something along the lines of, “Well…it depends on who you are and what problem you’re trying to solve.”

For self-serve users, it’s not a major issue. They have a very specific itch to scratch and they need a combination of tools to solve the problem. End users described us as a content calendar, employee onboarding tracker, production title tracker, product roadmap, budget tracker, etc.

But as we moved up the market, this presented a serious problem for our customer champions in large enterprise land & expand opportunities who had to defend us when we weren’t in the room. Imagine the following dialogue playing out within an account:

IT Procurement Manager: So, what is this Airtable thing and why do we need it?

Customer Champion: Airtable is awesome. My team loves it. It’s an incredibly powerful software we use to organize our content operations, marketing campaigns, and creative assets.

IT Procurement Manager: Oh so it’s a project management tool? We already have a project management tool here. We can show you how to use the one we have….

Customer Champion: No, no, no, Airtable is a database and you can store hundreds of thousands of records in it. You can customize it any way you want and build flexible workflows.

IT Procurement Manager: Okay so it’s like a low-code platform for building apps? We can build an app for you. You’ll just need to fill out a support ticket….

Customer Champion: No, no, no, that’s not what we want. Ok let me show you what we’ve built and then you’ll know why Airtable is so awesome.

Take this conversation and multiply it thousands of times for all our customer champions and you’ll begin to understand why it was absolutely imperative that we align on our software category and present our vision to the world.

If your product doesn’t fit neatly into an existing category and you need to distance yourself from the competition, software category creation might be a strategy for you. Here’s a flowchart for how you might make this decision:

Do you need to consider software category creation as a strategy for your business?

Airtable has taken its first major step forward in defining a new software category: connected apps platform. This is a multi-year commitment and a full company effort to create, lead, and win this new category. This is why I joined Airtable and this is what makes gets me excited as a product marketing leader every morning.

It might be helpful for other marketing leaders to understand how Airtable took its first step in category design and category creation.

Defining a category starts with three components:

1. A big, meaty, industry-wide problem worth solving. This is a problem that can’t be solved overnight and inspires people to your cause. It should be a problem we can all agree on but also believe is just a part of our everyday lives.
2. The category name. You need to pick the actual words out of a dictionary. You’ll go through hundreds of potential names, each with strengths and weaknesses.
3. A narrative that brings it all together. What’s the two-minute story that pinpoints the problem, unveils your category name, and explains why your offering is uniquely differentiated?

It took us many months to define our category because it’s not easy trying to distill what you are into a few words. There are only a finite number of words in the English language and at the end of the day, it’s up to your leadership and employees to imbue the words with emotion and meaning.

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I’m super passionate about product marketing, category creation, and identifying the burning soul of a business. If you want to chat about any of these topics, feel free to send me an email: at kevin@harmonicmessage.com.

P.S. If you’re looking for a new adventure, consider applying for a role at Airtable.