Most launches disappear almost as quickly as they arrive.
A press release gets published. A keynote is delivered. The website gets refreshed. Marketing celebrates. Then everyone goes back to business as usual.
Lightning Strikes are different.
A Lightning Strike isn’t a launch. It’s a concentrated effort to change how a market thinks. Done well, it creates a moment that aligns the company internally while reshaping customer perception externally.
Over the past 15+ years, we’ve had the opportunity to help companies launch entirely new categories. While every company, market, and strategy is different, five lessons continue to show up.
1. Commit to the Moment
The most powerful thing a leadership team can do is put a date on the calendar. Not because the date itself matters, but because commitment changes behavior.
Once the company has a fixed moment to march toward, priorities become clearer, tradeoffs become easier, and decisions happen faster. Weekly standups replace occasional updates. Cross-functional dependencies become visible. Everyone knows what success looks like and when it has to happen.
A Lightning Strike begins long before launch day. It begins the moment the company commits
2. Build Belief inside before you Build It Outside
Markets rarely believe something the company itself doesn’t fully believe. The work starts with the leadership team, but it cannot stop there.
Every employee should understand the problem, the new POV, and why it matters. We often formalize this through an internal launch we call Burning of the Boats, a moment where the CEO commits to the new direction in front of the entire company. Ambassadors are identified and deployed across the organization to answer questions, reinforce the POV, and help others adopt it.
External launches are strongest when they reflect internal conviction.
3. A Lightning Strike is a Company imperative, Not a Marketing Campaign
Marketing plays a critical role, but it isn’t solely responsible for the success of the Lightning Strike.
Product must deliver.
Sales must tell the new story.
Customer Success must reinforce it.
Leadership must model it.
Every function has an opportunity to contribute to, and benefit from, the moment.
The best Lightning Strikes feel less like campaigns and more like a company-wide movement.
4. Lead with the Problem
Companies naturally want to talk about their solution. But your solution only matters once the market believes there is a problem important enough to solve.
That’s especially true when creating a category. If customers don’t recognize the problem, they have no reason to change how they think, what they prioritize, or where they spend.
A Lightning Strike starts by making the problem impossible to ignore.
The companies that create new markets spend as much time evangelizing the problem as they do introducing the solution. They help customers recognize a challenge they have been living with and create urgency to do something about it.
Once the market believes in the problem, it is ready to believe in a new way to solve it.
5. Repeat until the Market Believes
One Lightning Strike rarely changes a market. The best category creators think in years, not one-off events.
Each Lightning Strike should build on the last: Introducing the problem, defining the category, proving delivery, demonstrating customer success, and continually raising the standard competitors are forced to chase.
This isn’t peanut-butter marketing spread thinly across the year. It’s a series of concentrated moments that compound over time.
Markets aren’t won by being the loudest once. They’re won by consistently reinforcing the same belief until it becomes the way everyone thinks.
Want to start a category movement? Let’s have a conversation.
