What is a Product Category?

And How Do You Make One?

The concept of category making is popular amongst tech innovators, and for good reason. So, it’s not unusual for startup leaders to be asked whether or not they are going to create a new category. It may be tempting to quickly answer “of course”, but I’ve written today’s article to help you understand what that even means and what’s involved in category making.

Categories Help Us

You probably already know what a product is. One way to think about products is that any given product is a solution to a customer’s problem.

We buy a product to solve our problem. That may be something we consciously think about as a problem — such as needing to fix a broken pipe, or having to clean up the mess the broken pipe created. But often, we don’t think of the problems we’re solving as problems. I may buy a candy bar to satisfy my sweet tooth — that’s a solution to the problem that I’m craving chocolate. I may buy a new car to reliably get me to and from work— that may be a solution to the problem that my car keeps breaking down. I think you get the idea.

There are millions of products out there — in fact Amazon sells more than 75 million different products. Our…