Monte Carlo’s Counterintuitive Path to Category Leadership: Why They Waited Two Years to Launch Their Website

Monte Carlo’s Counterintuitive Path to Category Leadership: Why They Waited Two Years to Launch Their Website

The modern B2B startup playbook is clear: launch fast, build your brand, create content, and establish category leadership through aggressive marketing. Monte Carlo threw that playbook out the window. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Barr Moses revealed why the company operated without a website for their first two years – and how this unconventional choice strengthened their category leadership.

The Missing Website

“We actually took us a long time to get our first website,” Barr explains. “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 wasn’t an oversight or lack of resources. It was a deliberate strategy that flew in the face of conventional startup wisdom. But why?

Extreme Focus as Strategy

“I really believe in kind of being extreme in our focus,” Barr reveals. “The only thing that matters at Monte Carlo now and forever is getting as many customers as possible and making customers as happy as possible. And every single person at Monte Carlo should be working towards one of those two goals.”

This laser focus meant ruthlessly eliminating anything that didn’t directly serve these objectives. While most startups rush to build their brand presence, Monte Carlo chose to focus entirely on product development and customer success.

The Problem-First Approach

Instead of marketing a solution, Monte Carlo spent their early days deeply understanding the problem. “The idea of, hey, the data is wrong, what can I do about this? Or why am I always the last person to hear about this? Why am I hearing from downstream consumers that the data is wrong?” These questions drove their early customer conversations.

This approach helped them validate not just current pain points, but future market potential. “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.”

Letting Customers Define the Category

Rather than trying to define their category through marketing, Monte Carlo let it emerge organically from customer usage. “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.”

The All-Company Approach

While most companies delegate category creation to marketing, Monte Carlo made it everyone’s responsibility. “This is 100% a company wide thing,” Barr emphasizes. Each department played 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.”

Results of the Strategy

The results speak for themselves. By focusing intensely on product and customers before marketing, Monte Carlo built strong foundations for category leadership. Their website, when it finally launched, reflected deep customer understanding rather than marketing assumptions.

The Lesson for B2B Founders

Monte Carlo’s experience suggests that in B2B category creation, marketing might matter less than we think – at least initially. Instead of rushing to build brand presence, founders might be better served by:

• Focusing exclusively on product and customer success
• Letting category definition emerge from customer language
• Making category creation everyone’s responsibility
• Building marketing assets only after deep customer understanding

The conventional wisdom says you need a website on day one. Monte Carlo’s success suggests otherwise. Sometimes, the best way to build category leadership is to focus entirely on the fundamentals: product and customers. Everything else can wait.