Pando’s Marketing Playbook: Why This CMO-Turned-Founder Avoided Creating a New Category

Category creation is often seen as the holy grail of B2B tech marketing. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barbra Gago shared a counter-intuitive insight from her journey building Pando: sometimes, the better strategy is to elevate an existing category rather than create a new one.

The Greenhouse Lesson

The insight came from Barbra’s experience as head of marketing at Greenhouse. Initially, the team saw their product as fundamentally different from traditional Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). “Because of that, we’re like, okay, well, we’re not an ATS because ATS suck and they don’t add that much value. So we can’t call ourselves an ATS,” Barbra explains.

This led them to attempt creating a new category called “recruiting optimization.” It seemed like the right move – after all, they were introducing a methodology that made recruiting more strategic and culturally integrated. But they soon discovered a crucial flaw in this approach.

The Budget Reality Check

“Creating a new category when they already had a budget for an existing category didn’t really make sense because then where’s the budget for that new category?” Barbra notes. This realization led to a strategic pivot: “Change of strategy. Now our goal is to make this category way more valuable.”

Instead of fighting to create a new budget line item, they focused on elevating the perceived value of the ATS category. Their marketing efforts shifted to “making recruiting a really high impact, high value organization within the company.” The result? People using their platform started getting promoted and landing better jobs.

Applying the Lessons at Pando

This experience heavily influenced Pando’s go-to-market strategy. While they’re introducing innovative concepts like “just-in-time promotion,” they’re careful about how they position themselves in the market.

“Every company, because of even compliance, has budget, has some need for sure to do, quote unquote, performance reviews,” Barbra explains. “And to be honest, the category is, I would say, still a little bit flexible. Like, career progression is a new paradigm of how we’re thinking about it, and it is not performance reviews.”

Adapting to Market Conditions

The strategy has proven particularly valuable as market conditions shift. “Obviously, last year and the year before, everything is rallying. Everybody’s hiring, everybody’s spending ungodly amounts of money to recruit people. And it was an employee market,” Barbra recalls. During this period, career progression was a highly demanded feature.

But as the market changed, their positioning adapted while maintaining their core vision. They’re “still advocating for this and still kind of building the foundation and laying the foundation for that, but also now positioning slightly more in the traditional performance review space.”

The Positioning vs. Category Creation Balance

Barbra makes an important distinction between positioning and category creation: “I think that positioning is a constant evolution. I think that a category is something that ends up in G2 Crowd or Software Advice or the obvious thing on the spreadsheet of budgets of every company.”

Her advice for founders considering category creation? “Don’t get too stuck on it. If it doesn’t work, you have to be able to let it go if it’s not working.” She emphasizes watching for signals: “If people aren’t picking it up, if it’s not getting traction, if there aren’t competitors, if other people aren’t referring to that as a category or mentioning it.”

This pragmatic approach to market positioning offers valuable lessons for B2B tech founders. While creating a new category can be powerful, sometimes the smarter strategy is to transform an existing category from within. It’s about understanding where the budget already exists and focusing on making that space more valuable, rather than fighting to create new budget line items in already constrained corporate environments.