Hive Watch’s Category Creation Strategy: Moving Beyond “Bad Word” Legacy Solutions

Sometimes your biggest competitor isn’t another company – it’s your category’s reputation. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hive Watch founder Ryan Schonfeld revealed how they’re navigating this challenge in the physical security industry, where the dominant category has become toxic.

The Category Problem

“In physical security, what you’ll find is PSIM is literally and figuratively a four letter word,” Ryan explains. “It’s not something that most organizations want. It’s something that a lot of organizations have spent millions of dollars on over the last decade plus and not gotten much ROI.”

Breaking Free from Legacy Associations

Rather than trying to rehabilitate the PSIM category, Hive Watch took a different approach. As Ryan notes, “I’m not super concerned with the name of the category,” instead focusing on redefining how customers think about security software entirely.

Creating a New Framework

Hive Watch positions itself as what Ryan calls “the operating system for physical security” and “an orchestration platform.” This framing shifts the conversation from integration (PSIM’s focus) to optimization and intelligence.

Solving Real Problems, Not Category Problems

Instead of fighting category perceptions, they focused on addressing fundamental customer pain points. Ryan identified that security teams were “throwing more people at the problem to do manual analysis.” This inefficiency became their entry point for category redefinition.

Building Product Differentiation

Their approach to product development reinforced their category separation:

• Software-First: “Hive Watch is a platform, it’s software. There’s no hardware component”
• Integration-Light: “Sits on top of organizations existing infrastructure”
• Rapid Deployment: Reducing implementation from 14 months to 30 days

Market Evolution and Timing

The timing for category creation proved ideal. As Ryan notes, “I certainly think that COVID and distributed workforce has sped the adoption of that, particularly in corporate security, which if you look at a typical enterprise company, corporate security is probably substantially behind the rest of the organization with regard to technology adoption.”

Education Over Opposition

Rather than positioning themselves against PSIM directly, they focused on educating the market about new possibilities. This approach helped even with investors – Ryan found that while initially “almost every VC we talked to didn’t have a thesis on the physical security space,” by their Series A, many had developed investment theses around physical security transformation.

The Future Category Vision

Looking ahead, Ryan’s category vision is clear: “We’d like to be a market leader and a company where security teams looking at software should have a reason to go look at a product other than Hive Watch.” This aspiration isn’t about dominating an existing category – it’s about creating a new one that makes the old category irrelevant.

For founders facing similar category challenges, Hive Watch’s experience offers valuable lessons: Sometimes the best way to deal with negative category associations isn’t to fight them, but to transcend them. By focusing on fundamental customer problems rather than category definitions, you can create space for a new conversation about value delivery.

The key is understanding that categories are defined by customer problems, not product features. When you solve problems in fundamentally different ways, you earn the right to define a new category – even in markets that seem permanently defined by legacy solutions.