It’s packed with insights co-authors Mike Bruno and Sean Regan pulled from thousands of updates seed and series A founders shared with their investors.
What we found was a consistent set of issues that nearly every founder in the research experienced:
But most interesting - when we zoomed out and looked at the root causes of all of these issues, we found the equivalent of a category design smoking gun - most founders’ vision of market potential was obscured by existing market dynamics.
These founders felt forced to compete within the bounds set by other companies, which ultimately undermined their potential. As a result, their often better and cheaper solutions generated excitement, but didn’t lead to revenue, funding, or talent acquisition.
At Play Bigger, we call this phenomenon market myopia and addressing it is a key step towards realizing a higher-order TAM and success.
Good news - in the eBook we have a handy self assessment tool, and a series of worksheets to help you understand and overcome market myopia. And of course, we’re always happy to discuss and help troubleshoot with you - click here if you’d like to get in touch.
Dylan Thomas’s other virtues notwithstanding, one thing you really shouldn’t do in business is rage against the dying of the light. In particular when it comes to categories, which have life cyclesthat can be extremely profitable, until they aren’t.
The scrap heap of failed businesses is littered with enterprises that raged, and then rode their category into oblivion, refusing to recognize that the thing they dominated just wasn’t relevant anymore. Or more precisely, the problem it solved was universally accepted and as a result common and commoditized. The journey was over, but not knowing what else to do, they kept on marching.
Here are two great examples of companies in danger of taking this express elevator to irrelevance, but who instead rewrote the rules and expanded their category.
But like all great categories, the final stage of the lifecycle sees slowing growth and ultimately decline. So what do you do when growth is slowing? You re-scope the problem and expand your solution. It’s an ambitious and exceptionally difficult task under the bright lights of public markets and investors, requiring precision, a visionary executive team, and courage. And Docusign did just that at their Momentum 2024 conference this spring.
In front of thousands of live and virtual customers, prospects, investors and analysts, Allan Thygesen (CE), Robert Chatwani (President, Growth), Dmitri Krakovsky (CPO), Tanya Faddoul (VP, Customer Innovation) and other leaders, talked about a problem sitting in plain sight, which nobody thought could be solved.
Critical agreement data is trapped in dumb flat files.
Not just any data, but the stuff that allows business to work, and that underpins social contracts. That’s a big deal with big consequences worth about $2 trillion per year according to Docusign research.
Put another way, that’s 10% of the GDP of the United States of America!
Like the great companies who consciously move into a second act - think iTunes at Apple, AWS at Amazon or Creative Cloud at Adobe - Docusign announced a new set of solutions to solve this problem:
Docusign IAM = Intelligent Agreement Management.
Sounds easy right? It wasn’t. Moving from eSignature to Intelligent Agreement Management was an almost impossible journey that only succeeded with a deep commitment to the category design method from top to bottom and a robust change management engine that ensured its adoption across the enterprise.
Bravo and congratulations to the entire Docusign team on Strike One. Lightning Strike two is already in the works and oh boy, do we have a doozy of a follow-up. Stay tuned!
Cornerstone OnDemand
If you don’t know Cornerstone, the odds are you know their content or have used their systems. They’re the heavyweights in learning management systems (LMS) - the folks behind the training content and people management software that power the biggest enterprises in the world.
But Cornerstone realized a new generation of workers and an entirely new paradigm of working were about to change everything in the talent management and learning space. If they didn’t define that change, somebody else would.
And so, this May, Cornerstone again reinvented the category by defining one of the biggest problems facing CEOs today. Here’s how Himanshu Pasule (CEO) put it during their Chicago Lightning Strike event "As the velocity of change in how we work accelerates, organizations grapple with an inability to keep pace.
People can’t deliver what organizations need, when and where they need it, creating a giant workforce readiness gap.”
He revealed that a stunning 63% of enterprise leaders don’t believe their workforce is adaptable to change. The consequences of this are an equally breathtaking $8.5 Trillion loss in unrealized revenue. Think about that for a moment. The annual revenue of the largest American corporations (Fortune 500) is $18.2 trillion. Worldwide it’s more than $80 Trillion.
So... more than 10% of revenue goes up in smoke because of this problem. That is exactly the kind of problem we at Play Bigger like to invest in — Giant and impossible to solve.
So how do you solve it? With a new holistic Workforce Agility platform called Cornerstone Galaxy
Empowering every enterprise to close this Workforce Readiness Gap. And setting Cornerstone on a path to once again design, define and dominate a new category.
3. Key Takeaways from the S2G CEO Summit
It was a record turnout for S2G, with 90+ CEOs and Founders across climate tech turning up to their annual summit which was headlined in part by Play Bigger’s Jason Wellcome and Mike Bruno. At the summit, CEOs were split into three focus areas based on their industry - Ocean, Energy and Food - each of which participated in a problem work session. The first step of Play Bigger’s category design process.
Here are our three key takeaways from those sessions:
Big breakthroughs need tight problems. Usually giant breakthroughs have numerous potential applications, but lack a clear, single minded problem they solve. While that may sound appealing, it is really a recipe for distraction costing companies focus, clarity and ultimately relevance. Focusing on problem market fit and then product market fit - in that order - is critical for these companies to achieve relevance. While chasing every possible application without a unified problem undermines understanding.
Convergence is a catalyst. Bringing unique minds together and fostering an environment for open idea sharing is a force multiplier for recognizing what’s possible. Different perspectives mixed with deep domain expertise is a powerful combination to unlocking new paths forward and expanding category potential. Simply put, when founders across disciplines and domains come together to help each other, good things happen.
Parity is killing primacy. In the climate and sustainability space, being as good as the current standard is - for some reason - the gold standard (it tastes just like a hamburger! It works as good as a traditional air conditioner! and on and on). That’s even worse than playing the better game, which invites (at best) comparisons to existing solutions and a race to the bottom. A focus on being DIFFERENT, not simply better, needs to take hold for innovations in this space to reach the scale and impact our world so deeply needs.
Mike, Jason and S2G Managing Partner, Chuck Templeton, go into even more detail on an episode of the S2G Podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here >>
Share Bigger
Category Design ain’t for everyone, but if you know someone with a penchant for thinking bigger, why not invite them to the Play Bigger newsletter?
This month’s newsletter is all about vision and perspective. It’s an invitation to shift how you see the competition and the opportunity, to define something altogether different. We hope it will inspire you to do just that!