Inside Cinchy’s Pivot From Product to Category: How One Change in Messaging Transformed Their Enterprise Sales

When you’re building a category, getting the timing right is as crucial as getting the message right. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dan DeMers shared how Cinchy’s bold vision of obsolete applications nearly derailed their category creation efforts – and how finding the right temporal focus ultimately unlocked their market.

The Original Vision: A World Without Apps When Cinchy first embarked on their category creation journey, they had an audacious vision. “We have a whole theory,” Dan explains, “where the evolution of metadata driven solutions will make it such that application interfaces can build themselves using metadata, such that what you think of today as an application in the future will store no data.”

Initially, this vision of a future without applications shaped their go-to-market strategy. As Dan recalls, “Initially our thoughts were apps were the enemy, right? You need an enemy.” It was a compelling narrative – applications were siloing data and creating the need for endless integration.

The Problem: Too Far Into the Future However, the market wasn’t ready for such a radical vision. “We realized that’s too far out into the future for people to really get their head around,” Dan shares. He draws a telling parallel: “It’s like talking about electric vehicles, I don’t know, 20 years ago when you knew it was theoretically possible, but practically no one would really end up be buying them en masse.”

The Pivot: Making Integration the Enemy Rather than abandoning their vision entirely, Cinchy adjusted their temporal focus. “We ended up going a little bit into the less distant future while still being consistent,” Dan explains. The enemy shifted from applications to integration – the copy-based movement of data that applications necessitate.

This pivot wasn’t just a messaging change; it was a fundamental reframing of the problem. As Dan puts it, “The problem isn’t the apps. The problem is the fact that we have to do copy based integration.”

The Impact: From Theory to Practice The shift from attacking apps to targeting integration made Cinchy’s value proposition more immediate and actionable. Dan illustrates this with a powerful analogy: “Anything of value you can’t copy. You can’t copy humans, you can’t copy intellectual property, you can’t copy money… Yet we live in a world where historically you’ve been forced to create endless copies of data. How whack is that?”

This messaging resonated because it addressed a pain point organizations were already feeling. “No one sits there and says, hey, I’m a bank. I want to make thousands of copies of your sensitive customer data. They don’t want to do that,” Dan explains.

The Strategy: Category Hijacking To accelerate adoption, Cinchy developed what Dan calls 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.”

Lessons for Category Creators Cinchy’s pivot offers valuable lessons for founders creating new categories:

1. Find the right temporal distance for your vision
2. Connect your future vision to current pain points
3. Make your enemy something customers already want to defeat
4. Keep your long-term vision while focusing on immediate value

The key is finding the sweet spot between being too incremental and too futuristic. As Dan notes, “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 goal isn’t to eliminate skepticism – it’s to make it productive.

For B2B founders creating new categories, Cinchy’s journey shows that success often lies not in changing your vision, but in finding the right path to help the market embrace it. Sometimes, that means taking a detour through the present to reach your vision of the future.