Are You Accidentally Scaring Away Customers?

As an entrepreneur, you probably love creating new things. You want to be a visionary, first-to-market, technology leader, world-changing innovator. You dream of becoming the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not necessarily bad or wrong. In fact, in some respects, it’s a requirement. However, it comes with a huge caveat: even though you love creating new things, consumers — in general — hate adopting new things. As a result, when you describe your startup in ways that make it seem new, unique, or “revolutionary,” you risk scaring away potential customers.

I was recently reminded of this issue when an entrepreneur sent an email asking for my advice about getting traction for a product in what he described as a “new category.”

For those who don’t know, a “new category” is a way of describing a market that either doesn’t exist or is in its earliest stage of existence. We might say, for example, that the market for self-propelled pizza vending machines is a new market. Startups create new markets and create demand where none exists in order to position themselves as the de facto market leaders, and then they’re able to capitalize on all the newly created demand.

This strategy is described in detail in a popular entrepreneurship book called Play Bigger, and it’s constantly being preached across the startup ecosystem. Plenty of founders are enamored by the concept, and, to be fair, I can certainly appreciate why creating a new category seems like a good idea in theory.

Yes, if you do manage to build a huge new category, you’ll find yourself in a great position. But pay close attention to that pesky two-letter word that so often kills startups — the word “if.” Sure, creating and, by default, dominating a category sounds great in theory. However, in practice, it has a glaring issue.

Specifically, in the startup world, the more unique a business seems in the minds of potential customers — its product, its mission, its user interface, etcetera — the harder it’s going to be to build a successful company. Simply put, even if you genuinely are creating something unique and revolutionary, you don’t want your users feeling like they’re trying something new. Consumers love familiarity. New things scare them.

Entrepreneurs and users value different things

Most entrepreneurs think their job is to create new things. And, to be fair, I suppose they’re not entirely wrong; entrepreneurs often create new products and companies that didn’t previously exist.

But we have to remember that, while entrepreneurs do occasionally create new things, creating new things isn’t the purpose of entrepreneurship. Creating new things is a mechanism by which entrepreneurial action happens. In contrast, the purpose of entrepreneurship is to help solve people’s problems in more efficient ways.

Technically, solving people’s problems in more efficient ways doesn’t inherently require creating new things. After all, efficiency can be achieved by removing things, too.

So imagine this: What if you could solve someone’s problem without creating something new? Would you do it?

The answer to this question from every entrepreneur should be an immediate and enthusiastic “YES!” After all, entrepreneurship is a mechanism for solving problems, not creating new things. Unfortunately, that’s not how most entrepreneurs see their work. Instead, they wonder: “What can I build that doesn’t already exist?”

I don’t blame entrepreneurs for their preference toward building new things. That’s where the presumed reward is. Entrepreneurs who build new things get funding, get to run companies, and get whatever cultural cache they're looking for from being "an entrepreneur."

Regardless, the people who eventually use the products of entrepreneurs — consumers — don’t actually want new things. New things require money. They require time. They require learning. In an ideal consumer world, the things we already have would solve our problems and we wouldn’t need anything new.

This leads to the fundamental flaw in the idea of trying to start a new category: when you’re operating in a new category, demand doesn’t already exist. And creating demand is exponentially harder than serving existing demand.

Teaching is harder than selling

Whenever I see/hear entrepreneurs using the phrase “new category” to describe their market, I want to scream “NOOOOOOOOOO! You’re making a huge mistake!” at the top of my lungs. Is it possible to create a new category? Maybe. Is it possible to exist in a new category? Perhaps. But why would you want to do that to yourself? You’re committing to a massive amount of unnecessary work.

Specifically, the work you’re committing yourself to is educational work because, by definition, a new market category is something consumers don’t understand. That’s not good. It means before you can ever sell your customers, you have to teach them about the category, and teaching people takes lots of time and costs lots of money. Plus, just because you’ve taught someone something valuable, there’s no guarantee they’ll want anything else from you. Trust me on this… I spend lots of time teaching people here on LinkedIn with my content, but how many of you reading this are subscribed to my newsletter or my podcast? Hmmmmmm? Is that really too big of an ask? They’re both FREE!

In other words, by boxing yourself into the idea you exist inside a “new category,” you’re basically committing to teaching first, selling second.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that creating a new category and then selling into it is an impossible strategy. I’m sure some companies have done it before. But it’s a particularly challenging strategy, and building startups is already hard enough. Why make it harder by forcing yourself into a strategy that’s inherently more difficult?

Start where demand already exists

Instead of trying to launch a startup in a new category, I always encourage the entrepreneurs I advise to find ways of positioning their companies inside well-defined categories consumers already understand and where they’ve already demonstrated a willingness to spend money. This eliminates the expensive and slow process of teaching people, and it allows entrepreneurs to focus all their efforts on capturing existing demand.

Eventually, as your business grows and you have a large audience, you can begin to create a new category and slowly bring your consumers into it over time.

For the record, when you hear about big, wildly successful companies creating new categories, this is actually what’s happening. The companies never started in completely new spaces. They began in categories consumers were already familiar with, and then, over time they evolved their markets into new categories.

A great example of a company in the process of creating a new category is Uber. People like to describe Uber as a category creator, and it is. Uber is, ultimately, going to be creating the category of subscription, on-demand transportation. By that I mean, in the future, I expect most of us won’t own our own vehicles. Instead, we’re going to have subscriptions to (presumably self-driving) car services.

But that transition into a new category isn’t happening instantly. After all, I’m guessing most of you reading this own your own cars, and the new on-demand car subscription services category Uber hopes to one day dominate is developing slowly by incubating in an existing market with existing market demand. Specifically, Uber began by offering a more effective hailing mechanism for traditional taxis — press a button on your phone and the taxi comes to you! Over the course of decades, we’ll gradually segue into none of us owning personal cars and all of us pressing buttons on our phones whenever we need a ride. When that happens, yes, it’ll be a new category. But it will have taken a long time, a lot of money, and a lot of consumer education to get us there.

To be clear, I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I’m an entrepreneur, too, and I love creating new things. But building new categories should never be a starting point for a company. It’s an end goal. So even if you think your startup is revolutionary and wildly different than anything that currently exists, figure out how to wedge whatever new thing you’re building into a category consumers already understand and are willing to pay for. That’s what’ll get you the initial traction you need to eventually create something new and truly world-changing.

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Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on Medium, where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to Web Masters, his podcast exploring digital entrepreneurship.