If you're an early stage startup, don't create a category.

Borrow and use a bunch of existing categories! 👇🏻

In the early days of a startup that is bending the lines of product categories, it can feel high stakes to try and make the best possible choice.

I'm here to relieve you a bit of the heavy burden you carry.

It doesn't really matter what you call your startup — as long as it makes sense to the segment you're targeting.

In the early days of Airtable, they would often use and mingle all sorts of different category names depending on their audience.

The point is to give your potential customers a reference point that will help them get to clarity faster.

By choosing a category they know, you'll be able to highlight your unique strengths in comparison to that category they have in their head (i.e. like calling a Airtable an advanced spreadsheet for prosumers).

A few things to avoid:

❌ If you call your product multiple things, don't put them next to each other on the same page (which should be a hint... you need different pages for different target segments 😉)

❌ This doesn't apply to startups that trying to differentiate in mature product categories (i.e. like a new CRM); they should just call themselves the one category that everyone knows