Why Category Creation Is a Trap (And What Actually Works)

The Front Lines

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Andrea Bailiff-Gush.

Head of Marketing · Reco

Andrea is a collaborative and transformational marketing leader with over 15 years of experience building high-performing teams and programs in B2B SaaS, with a specialization in cybersecurity. She has supported organizations across multiple growth stages, from Seed round through acquisition, and is passionate about driving profitable outcomes while improving customer well-being.

Andrea currently leads marketing at Reco, a hyper-growth cybersecurity company that has scaled from $1M to over $20M.

Guest

Andrea Bailiff-Gush

Head of Marketing

Company:

Reco

Location:

Chicago, Illinois, United States

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In this episode of The Marketing Front Lines, we sit down with Andrea Bailiff-Gush, Head of Marketing at Reco, a SaaS security and AI governance company. While most guests on shows like this make the case for category creation, Andrea does the opposite — drawing on a failed category launch, years in cybersecurity marketing, and a front-row seat to the AI security space to explain why the strategy fails far more often than it succeeds, what the real warning signs are, and how sophisticated marketers can stand out without creating a category at all.

Topics Discussed:

Why category creation is often a solution to a company problem, not a customer problem
The "Decision Augmentation" failure: what went wrong and why
The three hell-no signals that mean you should abandon category creation
Why you can't have a category of one — and why competitors won't save you
How Gong got it right (and what most companies get wrong when they try to copy that playbook)
The hidden resource cost: PR, analyst relations, content, and internal evangelism
How AI is going to upend analyst relations and category-based buying altogether
What to do instead: descriptive positioning, differentiation without category creation
Book recommendation: Play Bigger

Seven takeaways from this conversation.

Actionable for Sales & Marketing Tech Builders founders

Category Creation That Solves Your Problem, Not the Customer's, Will Always Fail
The most common mistake Andrea has seen across high-growth startups is using category creation as a solution to a business growth problem rather than a buyer pain point. Her own experience launching the "Decision Augmentation" category — which was supposed to reframe a PR tool in the age of early AI — is the case study. The campaign had strong thought leadership, analyst investment, and even a conference "lightning strike" moment. It still fell completely flat because customers didn't recognize the pain it claimed to solve. The diagnosis: the company was trying to fix its own positioning problem, not a real gap in the market. Before any category conversation starts, the only question that matters is whether your buyer is actively feeling a pain that no existing solution addresses.
The Three Hell-No Signals for Category Creation
Andrea's framework for when to kill the idea immediately: (1) There's no clear, unmet pain — if customers aren't frustrated with existing solutions, there's no whitespace. (2) Existing solutions are already meeting the pain adequately — you'd be creating confusion, not clarity. (3) Buyers aren't asking for a new way to think about the problem. If your customer interviews aren't surfacing language that points toward a gap in how the market is organized, you're ahead of the market in a way that will cost you enormously to bridge.
You Cannot Force a Category Into Existence — and You Can't Have a Category of One
A category only becomes real when buyers recognize it and when multiple companies orient around it. One of the reasons "Decision Augmentation" failed is that no other company associated themselves with the term — it was a category of one. Practically, this means that if you're serious about creating a category, you need third parties (analysts, industry publications, research firms) to bucket multiple players together. Companies can't do this alone, and founders who think they'll get competitors to collaborate are usually in for a rude awakening.
The True Cost of Category Creation Is Wildly Underestimated
The resource requirements aren't just financial. You're committing your marketing team and product team to sustained market education — the equivalent of a full rebrand in terms of internal lift. You'll need a serious PR investment, deep analyst relations work, and company-wide evangelism. Andrea points to the SaaS security category: five years in, with consistent market education investment, Gartner still doesn't recognize it as a standalone category. One founder Brett spoke with spent eight years and raised $400M before Gartner created the magic quadrant for his space. If you're a Series A or B company, this math almost never works.
Gong Got It Right — Here's the Specific Reason Why
Gong's "revenue intelligence" category works because it was anchored to a real, felt pain: sales teams wanted more visibility into their deals and pipeline. The category name described the solution to that pain in plain language. It wasn't invented to differentiate Gong from competitors — it emerged from what buyers were already struggling to articulate. That's the test. If you swap out your company name and the category still makes sense as a description of a buyer's problem, you might have something. If the category only makes sense when your company is the reference point, you don't.
Descriptive Positioning Is Underrated and Underused
When category creation isn't the right move, the alternative isn't to do nothing — it's to get ruthlessly descriptive. Andrea's current challenge at Reco is combining SaaS security and AI governance without accidentally positioning as an "AI security" company (which is too broad and confusing). Her approach: resist the temptation to be cute and clever, and instead describe what you do in plain language that a buyer would use at a cocktail party. Differentiation can live in efficiency claims, consolidation messaging, or cost-to-value framing — none of which requires inventing a new category.
AI Will Fundamentally Change How Buyers Discover and Evaluate Solutions
The analyst relations model that underlies category creation — get into Magic Quadrants, influence research reports, compete for positioning in market guides — may have a shorter shelf life than most marketers assume. As buyers increasingly use AI agents as buying tools (running queries directly against Claude, ChatGPT, or browser-enabled agents), the ability to influence an AI's output becomes more valuable than placement in a Gartner report. Andrea's prediction: influencing what an AI browser returns for a buying query will be more efficient and cost-effective than the traditional analyst relations playbook.

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