Why you (probably) shouldn't create a new category

James Evans, co-founder of CommandBar, on embracing “easy mode” and doubling their growth rate

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and I’m back with a 🔥 edition of Growth Unhinged, my newsletter that explores the unexpected behind the fastest-growing startups. 

The #1 edition of Growth Unhinged is Anthony Pierri’s definitive SaaS homepage framework (it has been viewed 55,000 times 🤯). Anthony urges folks to resist the temptation to create a new category. Most companies, he argues, already compete in an existing category whether they embrace it or not.

James Evans, co-founder and CEO of Insight-backed CommandBar, learned this lesson firsthand. Creating a category propelled CommandBar to a $19M Series A, but it meant building on “hard mode”, James says. Shifting to “easy mode” — disrupting an existing category — helped CommandBar double their growth rate. Keep reading to find out why.

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CommandBar didn’t begin life as a product but as a weird little feature we built for ourselves.

My co-founders and I were building a web app. It became hard to use. As users ourselves, we found popups (the normal solution to “onboarding problems”) annoying, and we figured other users did too. So instead we built an alternative to the UI: a little magic search bar that let users search for what they were trying to do. Kind of like a command line. We didn’t invent the idea — it was already popular in products like VS Code, Linear, and Superhuman.

It worked so well that we thought this search interface should be as ubiquitous as help chat. 15 years ago, there was no chat. Now, every product has it in the bottom right. We thought cmd+k would follow the same trajectory. And we thought selling the next software building block as a service would be a giant opportunity.

It wasn’t clear if this company would work. No one else was doing this.It would embed into the frontend of other companies, which brought a bunch of challenges.

We did what many first-time founders do: we let YC make the decision. We applied with the idea, got in, and started building CommandBar. Here’s what our product looked like three months in (this is the demo we used in our $4.8M seed deck):

A year later, we were psyched with our progress. The cmd+k interface was spreading. We won exciting early customers — Gusto, LaunchDarkly, ClickUp, Netlify, etc. – that helped our team of five speed toward $1M of ARR.

The fact that no one else was doing this meant we were building a category, which challenged us in a few ways:

• No competition. Our two biggest “competitors” were no action (a company thinking they didn’t need an interface like ours), or, less commonly, a company building it themselves.

• Low product understanding. We explained what we did—a lot. We’d spend the first 20 minutes of a discovery call getting people to understand the fundamentals of our product. Some thought we did backend search (like Algolia), others believed we did product tours (which we do now, but didn’t then), etc.

• Mixed buyer profile. We sold to different buyers. Sometimes the founder, sometimes the CTO, sometimes a PM, sometimes an engineer with a hackathon project.

We initially loved the former. How liberating not to have to worry about competitors! We actually pitched this to our first few hires — “we can build whatever we think is best.”

The latter two were problems, but we figured we could fight through them. I now call these problems symptoms of playing on “hard mode.”

But we didn’t make much progress because there was low buyer urgency. Companies often showed a lot of interest, then would take months or quarters for the project. With some, it never happened. This is why I call category creation “playing on hard mode.” Startups are never easy, but you don’t get extra credit for making it even harder.

We felt this most in the summer of 2022, right after our Series A. That summer, tech valuations reset, layoffs were widespread—and we realized we were a vitamin.

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How we re-positioned CommandBar (and doubled our growth rate)

Prospects often asked us “Are you a replacement for X”? We always said no. We were unique. We were creating a category.

Prospects had compared us to Pendo (and other tools like it that fall under the nauseatingly named category “digital adoption”) more than any other product. Since Pendo wasn’t cmd+k-as-a-service, we never considered saying yes. We’d say things like “in-product pop-ups solve a similar problem to us (user education). So maybe you can stop using them if users have access to a command bar interface.”

In the summer of 2022, someone said: “if you can replace Pendo for me, I can buy you. If you can’t, it’s going to have to wait a year.”

This time we stopped to consider what saying “yes” would mean: switching to easy mode. So we took a closer look at products in the space.

The digital adoption category was a dozy field filled with mediocre products. The annoying popups that invite you to webinars, force you on 20-step tours the first time you login, and even bombard you with multiple CTAs at the same time? Powered by digital adoption products.

The status quo sucked for both sides: companies struggled to generate more than sugar-high increases in engagement, and annoyed users immediately closed the pop-ups.

It’s hard to name more perfect conditions for category disruption: dissatisfied customers for low-performing products that also cost too much.

So, we decided to say “yes.” We would become a replacement for <insert digital adoption vendor>.

To do this, we had to make three big changes:

• Product — build functionality to replace the meaningful bits of digital adoption tools (without sacrificing our soul)

• Marketing — bat signal to digital adoption buyers that we were ready to mingle

• Sales — learn how to sell against competition

Here’s how we did those things (and how they went).

Product