6 Counter-Intuitive GTM Lessons from Cinchy’s Category Creation Journey

Most enterprise tech founders follow a predictable playbook: build something incrementally better, use conventional marketing, and avoid anything too radical. Dan DeMers, founder of data collaboration platform Cinchy, threw that playbook out the window. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he revealed how breaking established rules led to stronger market positioning.

1. Embrace Being the “Crazy One” When you’re creating a category, skepticism isn’t just common – it’s essential. “Quite frankly, a lot of people think you’re crazy, especially in the early days,” Dan explains. “If you’re truly creating a category, or at least you believe you are and no one thinks you’re crazy, then there’s something wrong with that.”

The lesson? If everyone immediately agrees with your vision, you might not be pushing hard enough to create something truly transformative.

2. Make Enterprise Marketing Fun Again While most enterprise tech companies opt for safe, conventional branding, Cinchy deliberately chose to stand out. At a recent Gartner event, their provocative “no integration” messaging drove significant engagement. As Dan notes, “At least a third of the traffic that came to our booth and were definitely one of the busiest booths at the event was, what does this mean? The obsolescence of integration?”

The insight here is powerful: Enterprise buyers are humans too. “If they’re humans, they watch video. Sorry. And if they don’t, when they retire, someone else will, I guess. There’s no question about it. It’s like they live on a different planet and they’re a different species or something.”

3. Build a Media Engine, Not Just a Marketing Department Cinchy’s approach to content creation goes beyond traditional marketing. They established Cinchy Studios, their content factory, and Cinchy TV, a destination for binge-worthy content about data collaboration. The results were striking: “When we started to get inbound prospects… they would watch literally hundreds of hours of the content, like it was crazy.”

This strategy creates educated prospects who reach out already understanding the category and vision, significantly shortening sales cycles.

4. Master the “Different vs. Better” Framework One of Cinchy’s most valuable insights was understanding the distinction between capturing attention and driving sales. “Different, not better, is amazing at getting attention, but it doesn’t translate to immediate sales,” Dan explains. Their solution? “We are different, not better is the hook. But when it comes to a sales process, we are actually better because we are different.”
5. Create Infrastructure Around Your Category Instead of just marketing their product, Cinchy built ecosystem infrastructure through the Data Collaboration Alliance. This nonprofit organization develops standards and creates partnerships, reducing friction in category adoption. As Dan explains, “Rather than Cinchy Inc. pushing for standards, it’s going through the alliance, where we’re working with other organizations and data privacy experts… it creates a lot less friction and anyone can join.”
6. Deploy Category Hijacking Rather than waiting for perfect category recognition, Cinchy developed a “category hijacking” strategy. “We are designing a category, we are naming it, framing it, claiming it… But we are doing what we call category hijacking, which is we’re going to surf whatever the biggest wave is, but intercept that demand and redirect it.”

This approach allows them to capture existing market demand while steering it toward their category vision. Dan illustrates this with a mobile phone analogy: you can intercept demand for cordless phones because a mobile phone is also cordless, but offers much more.

The thread connecting these lessons is clear: successful category creation requires rejecting conventional wisdom about enterprise GTM strategies. It’s not enough to be incrementally better – you need to be fundamentally different, build supporting infrastructure, and create content that educates while it entertains.

For founders embarking on category creation, Dan’s final advice is unequivocal: “Don’t go half in. You have to go all the way or none of the way. You can’t just dip your toes.” In the end, creating a new category isn’t about following best practices – it’s about having the courage to create new ones.