5 Unconventional Go-to-Market Lessons from Monte Carlo’s Category Creation Journey

Category creation rarely follows a textbook approach. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses revealed how ignoring conventional wisdom and focusing obsessively on customers helped build the data observability category. Here are the key lessons every B2B founder should consider.

1. Validate the Problem’s Future, Not Just Its Present

When validating a market opportunity, most founders focus on current pain points. Monte Carlo went further, evaluating how the problem would evolve. “It became clear that it’s going to be a problem that’s going to be worse over time because people are going to be using data, more data is going to become more critical to companies operations, more critical to companies products,” Barr explains. This forward-looking validation helped confirm they weren’t just solving today’s problem, but tomorrow’s crisis.

2. Let Customers Define Your Category

Rather than crafting the perfect category name in a boardroom, Monte Carlo let customer language guide them. “In the early days, I actually had a couple of people who told me, that is such a terrible word… But then listening to customers, they just kept repeating those words and they just kept using those words, and they started writing blogs using data observability,” Barr recalls. The lesson? Sometimes the best category names emerge organically from customer usage rather than marketing meetings.

3. Build Product First, Brand Later

In an era where many startups prioritize brand building, Monte Carlo took a contrarian approach. “We actually took us a long time to get our first website,” Barr reveals. “I think it was maybe a couple of years into the company’s existence. We already had the product, we had customers, we had the full thing where we didn’t have a website.” This intense focus on product and customers over marketing collateral proved crucial for establishing category leadership.

4. Make Customer-Centricity a Hiring Filter

Many companies claim to be customer-obsessed, but Monte Carlo built it into their hiring process. “When we hire people, both folks in management positions or not, we try to understand what motivates them. And if we understand that you care about making an impact by your customers, that is what we look for… we screen for that pretty aggressively,” Barr explains. This ensures customer focus remains central to company culture as the team grows.

5. Turn Category Creation into a Company-Wide Mission

Instead of relegating category creation to marketing, Monte Carlo made it everyone’s responsibility. “This is 100% a company wide thing,” Barr emphasizes. Each department plays a unique role: “Our product team is basically building a product that’s completely innovative. There isn’t anything like this that they can look to… Our marketing team is responsible for spreading or speaking with customers or getting the building the awareness around the fact that there is a solution for this problem.”

6. Stay Humble About Your Own Intuition

Even with deep domain expertise, founders must remain open to being wrong about customer needs. As Barr shares, “In the early days, we’re shipping the early MVPs, and there was a feature that I was 100% sure would be very important, and that was because it was very important to me as a data leader prior to starting Monte Carlo. And I was so wrong. Nobody used that feature.”

These lessons challenge conventional wisdom about category creation and go-to-market strategy. Rather than following traditional playbooks focused on marketing and messaging, Monte Carlo’s approach centered on deep customer understanding, product excellence, and company-wide alignment around customer needs.

For B2B founders embarking on their own category creation journeys, Monte Carlo’s experience suggests that the path to category leadership might be less about declaring a category exists, and more about helping customers articulate and solve their evolving problems. As Barr summarizes: “The answer lies with your customers. That is just always true and it’s very tempting to think that you know the answer or you have some gut around it or maybe your experiences should impact this. Our customers are just the True North, always and forever.”