The Category Creation Formula

Discover, Design, and Win New Market Categories

By: Kevin Maney, Mike Damphousse

Narrated by: Chris Brinkley

Innovative concepts, tools, and playbooks for discovering, defining, and taking charge of new market categories, by two of the leaders of the category design movement.

The most exciting—and often most valuable—companies create, develop and win new categories of products or services. Examples range from the Zamboni company a century ago to OpenAI today. It also includes startups that you may not have heard of yet, but will as their categories take off.

Category creation and development should be the goal of any company that wants to make a difference. And the way to achieve that is through the discipline of strategic category design.

Kevin Maney helped introduce category design in the bestseller Play Bigger. Now, he and Mike Damphousse—an experienced CEO, investor, and marketing executive—share the secrets that they’ve learned over the past decade, plus new concepts and tools that help companies see and frame new categories. Their advisory firm has worked on strategic category design projects with more than fifty companies and guided workshops for hundreds more at incubators and VC portfolio gatherings.

The Category Creation Formula reveals the processes they rely on and the truths about categories that they’ve uncovered, clearly laid out so any entrepreneur or leadership team can benefit from them, too.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

The single most important concept in category design

This is the first book about category design (I’ve read them all) that really unlocks the ability to be the in house category designer in your company. I learned the concepts of the category formula and the adjacent possible 2 years ago from the authors of this book and they have transformed my career. I just marathon read it because I’m deep in it and needed to relearn. Highly recommend.

My new North Star

I loved Category Creation Formula.

Since reading it, I feel like I’m looking at business through an always-on category-adjacent lens.

Not fuzzy. Not theoretical.

Sharp.

The kind of sharp focus you experience when you’re getting your eyes tested and the optometrist keeps asking, “Better one, or better two?”

Then suddenly, the correction clicks.

Super clarity.

That’s what this book did for me.

Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse reveal the exact process for category design, not only for enterprise companies, but for small businesses, founders, consultants, and individuals who want to stop blending in.

A lot of category design books give you the big “aha” moment.

Then you close the book and think, “Okay, now how do I actually do this without needing a strategy department, a whiteboard war room, and twelve consultants named Chad?”

This book is different.

It delivers the formula, the steps, and the process in a clear, practical way.

For me, it connected the dots between positioning, market education, buyer belief, and the discipline required to create a category instead of simply competing inside someone else’s.

I’ve found my new North Star.