The Anti-Feature War: How Bloomfilter Refused to Compete in the Wrong Category Despite Analyst Pressure

The Anti-Feature War: How Bloomfilter Refused to Compete in the Wrong Category Despite Analyst Pressure

When industry analysts try to fit your company into an existing category, the pressure to conform can be overwhelming. But sometimes, winning means refusing to play the game everyone else is playing.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andrew Wolfe, Co-CEO of Bloomfilter, revealed why his company rejected categorization as a value stream platform, despite analyst pressure and the allure of an established market.

The Wrong Game “We talk to analysts, which we’re in the early days of doing. That’s how we like to talk about our product now people will put us in the value stream space,” Andrew explains. But this categorization posed a fundamental problem: “We don’t think we belong in that space… I think they’re going after really more engineering productivity.”

The temptation to accept this categorization was strong. Value stream platforms represent an established market with clear buyer expectations and budget allocation. But Andrew saw a crucial distinction: “We don’t believe that’s where the value is. We believe that software is a whole process and it has upstream problems and downstream problems. Engineering certainly can be a problem, but tends not to be the biggest problem that most organizations.”

The Cost of Conformity Competing in the wrong category means being judged by irrelevant metrics. “You’re competing in a category where you don’t have all the features and functionality that the other people do,” Andrew notes. “You might have some overlap. The ven diagram might exist, but you don’t have a lot of overlap.”

This creates a lose-lose situation: “So they’re competing in a feature set. That’s what everything’s being compared to. And you have a small percentage of that. So you look like a laggard. You look like you’re not innovating. In reality, you are innovating, but you’re in a space that they’re not really categorizing yet.”

The Daily Battle Maintaining this position requires constant vigilance. “You have to continue to fight that tide and show why you’re different. And you have to do that every day and say, hey, are they talking about this way? Are they talking about these type of features?” Andrew explains.

The Broader Truth Yet Andrew’s experience reveals a broader truth about category creation: “Just because you want to be different doesn’t mean you have to be different. There’s a lot of great businesses in the CRM market… Salesforce is number one and they’re like $40 billion in revenue or whatever this year. But HubSpot is doing pretty good. No one’s complaining about HubSpot.”

The key is recognizing when true differentiation matters. For Bloomfilter, process mining for software development represented a fundamentally different approach to solving development inefficiencies. Competing as a value stream platform would have meant fighting feature battles instead of addressing root causes.

For B2B founders, this demonstrates the importance of category decisions in go-to-market strategy. The pressure to fit into established categories is real – they come with defined budgets, buying processes, and analyst recognition. But sometimes the fastest path to growth means charting your own course, even if it means fighting the daily battle of category definition.

The lesson? Don’t create a new category just to be different. But when your solution represents a fundamentally different approach to solving customer problems, be prepared to resist the gravitational pull of existing categories – even if it means taking the harder path.