Most founders think category design is something other companies do.
The category creators. Companies and teams with massive budgets. The ones who coin a new term like "Content Marketing" and run ads until the market repeats it back.
But for most SaaS founders, the goal isn’t to invent a category. Your goal is simpler (and more urgent):
Become unignorable inside the category you already sell into.
Because in crowded markets, you rarely lose to a competitor. You lose to confusion.
Your buyer reads your website and thinks:
That’s a category design problem. And the fastest way to fix it is not more content or better messaging. It’s better job clarity.
In your world, category design becomes much easier once you treat Job To Be Done as the unit of truth. Because jobs explain the why behind the signals you’re already collecting.
Category design is choosing the job you want to be remembered for
Most category conversations get stuck at labels such as:
But buyers don’t hire labels. They “hire” something that helps them accomplish a job: functional, emotional, and social. So category design isn’t naming. It’s you deciding:
When you can answer those, you don’t need to invent a new category. Instead you create a new standard inside the existing one. Much easier and much more cost effective.
Why founders get stuck: signals are everywhere, meaning is not
Modern GTM teams are swimming in signals: search trends, sales calls, competitor moves, product usage, support tickets, community chatter. Most teams can see activity. What they can’t see (quickly, consistently) is:
So they default to proxies:
And the market keeps hearing the same story from everyone. Category sameness is usually job-blindness.
The constraint is almost always a “blocked job”
Here’s the useful JTBD reframe for category design: A “constraint” isn’t a clever insight. It’s the place where the job consistently stalls, across multiple signal sources.
JTBD gives you a clean way to name it:
Our Content Value Chain system is already built to do this at scale: ingest signals, interpret them through a JTBD layer, predict job momentum, then activate actions (content, plays, workflows).
That matters for category design because it removes guesswork.
Instead of “what do we want to be known for?” you can ask:
“Which job is most consistently blocked for our ICP right now and what does the market get wrong about it?”
That blocked job is your constraint.
The new standard is “what job success must mean now”
Once you have the constraint, the next move is not a tagline.
It’s a standard buyers can use to evaluate:
JTBD makes this specific because job success is never just functional. It’s also emotional and social. So a durable “new standard” has three layers:
This is how you stop competing on features.
You compete on the definition of “done.”
What this looks like in practice (a Content Value Chain example)
A common “job” we see in SaaS is: “Help me build a content engine that drives pipeline without turning the founder into the bottleneck.”
If you listen only to surface signals, the market’s proxy becomes:
But when you interpret signals through JTBD, the underlying constraint is often:
The job can’t complete because context decays as execution scales.
Content starts to look right, but feel off. The founder re-enters as the system of record.
Quality control becomes a tax. That’s a blocked job.
And the “new standard” becomes something buyers can repeat:
A content system isn’t real unless it preserves intent across time, teams, and tooling.
That single standard clarifies why “more content” stopped working, and why structure beats volume.
A founder-grade category design worksheet (JTBD-powered)
If you want to build category clarity without inventing a category, write these four lines.
Not as marketing copy. As internal truth.
Then pressure test with signals:
If yes, you have a constraint worth building a standard around.
If not, you have a hypothesis.
Why this makes you unignorable
Most competitors talk about what they do.
Founders who win talk about what must be true for the job to succeed.
That difference is what buyers feel as:
And because jobs are stable (unlike channels, personas, and funnel stages), this category frame holds up even as the tactics change. That’s what “unignorable” actually is: Not louder messaging, but a clearer standard.
Next step: turn the job → constraint → standard into a compounding system
Category design only works if your content keeps reinforcing the standard. That’s where most teams slip: they find a strong frame… then fail to operationalize it.
The GTM Strategy Co-Pilot is built to do the operational part: