I'm Nick Franklin, Founder and CEO of ChartMogul. AMA!

[Nick (Nick Franklin)]

@raviramani

Category creation: We, Kriyadocs are a document collaboration platform focused on the publishing domain. Our typical customer is not used to procuring such services through the SaaS route and hence we effectively are creating a new category. Thus far, we have converted our existing customers into a managed SaaS situation and are getting ready to be fully self serve. Any insights you can share about creating and marketing in a new category would be great.

There is a great book Play Bigger which talks about category creation (probably you’ve read it too). Aside from just launching and seeing what works and what doesn’t (which is the most important thing to do)…I think it can be helpful to map out what your category is about, what other categories it presses up against, etc. this can help inform your product roadmap. For us we’ve defined our product category as a Subscription Data Platform…before coming up with this name we thought a lot about where ChartMogul sits, what it integrates with (and what it should integrate with in the future), what pieces are there and what’s missing and this helped us get a clear sense for what we’re building and the benefits it will bring to our current and future customers.