Lessons of Greatness: Design your category

Starting Greatness with Mike Maples

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways 3 traits of legendary startups:Extraordinary teamsBreakthrough products that change the futureCreating a new categoryBreakthrough startup founders are time travelers who discover a secret to a radically different future and they must come back to the present and convince early believers to embrace their secret and co-create that new future with them4 Steps to designing a category:1) Identify your founding insights and use them to identify your difference. 2) Create your category design blueprint3) Define your provocative point of view4) Mobilize your movement

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Startups change the future so they MUST be different, rather than better. Christopher Lochhead shows us how category designers realize that different is believable from a startup, but better is not. Any powerful startup idea pre-supposes an exponentially different future, which means your startup MUST change the way the people think about the future rather than incrementally improve on the products they already use. Different forces a choice rather than a comparison. And different sticks, while better gets lost in the noise. In this lesson of greatness, we cover the specific steps involved in applying category design to your startup.