Category creation
Naming a new category and selling the category before selling the product.
Counts as evidence: The company coined or deliberately promoted a category name as part of its go-to-market.
Who ran it
HubSpot · Naming inbound, then selling it by phone · 2006 to 2014
Category creation PrimaryThe founders' letter in the IPO prospectus describes calling the traditional method outbound and the new way inbound: pulling people in with useful content. HubSpot's own biography of Brian Halligan credits him with coining inbound marketing.
HubSpot · Beyond search: owned media and answer engines · 2022 to now
Category creation SupportingHubSpot launched Loop Marketing as its playbook for the AI era and renamed INBOUND to UNBOUND, saying a name rooted in one internet-era method was not enough.
Salesforce · The End of Software, sold by phone · 1999 to 2004
Category creation PrimarySalesforce registered "The End of Software", the "No Software" logo and "Success. Not Software." as trademarks, and pitched on-demand CRM as a new delivery model. It launched in February 2000 at an event themed around The End of Software, with 1,500 attendees.
Snowflake · Land and expand, the IPO, and the Data Cloud · 2019 to 2021
Category creation PrimarySnowflake named and sold the Data Cloud, an ecosystem where customers, partners, and data providers share data, and pitched its network effects. Earnings releases opened with "the Data Cloud company".
Snowflake · Scaling through clouds, partners, and developers · 2021 to 2024
Category creation SupportingThe Data Cloud pitch moved toward listing and monetizing data and data products through the Marketplace.
Snowflake · The AI Data Cloud and agents · 2023 to now
Category creation SupportingThe category name moved from the Data Cloud to the AI Data Cloud, with Cortex as the managed AI layer and Snowflake Intelligence for building data agents.
Okta · Cloud SSO and enterprise sales from day one · 2009 to 2013
Category creation PrimaryThe S-1 says Okta "pioneered identity in the cloud" with a "category defining platform". McKinnon describes the early years as being a lonely category creator, and says the marketing people thought was bad suddenly worked once the category flipped.
Okta · Specialized sales, profitability and AI agents · 2024 to now
Category creation SupportingThe 10-K sees a long-term opportunity to serve as an independent control plane for non-human identities and AI agents, and the Businesses at Work 2026 report is framed around agentic AI readiness.
Gong · Naming revenue intelligence, selling to the CRO · 2019 to 2022
Category creation PrimaryIn 2019 Gong decided it had outgrown conversation intelligence and named revenue intelligence, a word aimed at the chief revenue officer. For two years its advertising set revenue intelligence in a much bigger font, powered by Gong.
Gong · Revenue AI OS, enterprise expansion, marketplace · 2025 to now
Category creation SupportingThe category moved from revenue intelligence to Revenue AI and then the AI operating system for revenue teams, which Gong calls a category shift with itself as the standard.
monday.com · Sales, partners and the Work OS · 2018 to 2021
Category creation SupportingThe IPO story named a new category, Work OS, and monday 2.0 relaunched the product as a work operating system for building custom apps.
Zscaler · Cloud security instead of appliances, sold with carriers · 2008 to 2016
Category creation SupportingZscaler pitched replacing the castle-and-moat stack of on-premises appliances with security as a cloud service, and says it pioneered that approach. The S-1 never uses the phrase zero trust.
Zscaler · The Zero Trust Exchange reframing · 2020 to 2023
Category creation SupportingZscaler claims to have pioneered a cloud-delivered zero trust platform and the first cloud-delivered zero trust solution, not the zero trust term itself, which came from an analyst.
Vercel · Frontend Cloud for the enterprise: sales, partners, marketplaces · 2023 to 2024
Category creation SupportingThe CEO says early positioning should be relatable to what already exists, and that Vercel only later earned the right to try to define a category.