“We’re still the leader. But the market’s not listening anymore.”
You built the category.
You named the problem.
You rallied the market.
You became the default choice.
You owned the aisle.
And then … something shifted.
The problem you solved became expected.
The urgency faded.
What once sparked belief now feels like table stakes.
Competitors started bundling what you built—for free.
You’re still winning deals.
But the category isn’t growing.
And the energy that once drove momentum … is gone.
This is Existential Decline—the quiet drift into irrelevance that happens when the category you created stops creating demand.
Think Xerox. Kodak. HP. Evernote.
What It Feels Like
| You’re still hitting numbers—but growth has slowed
| Your category is fully adopted—but no longer differentiated
| You’re reacting to the market—not shaping it
| Your team is executing—but not inspired
| The press has moved on
| Competitors are repositioning around your gaps
Someone on your exec team asks:
“Are we still leading—or just maintaining?”
This is the danger of the Dominate phase of the Category Lifecycle.
You won.
But the problem you solved feels … done.
And the market is asking:
“What’s next?”
You don’t have a good answer.
Why It Happens
Category dominance is a gift—and a trap.
You created belief.
You scaled fast.
You became the Category King.
But kings only stay kings if they evolve the game.
| You can’t scale off a problem the market thinks is already solved.
The category becomes a box.
And the longer you stay in it, the harder it is to grow out of it.
Docusign: The Company That Escaped
Docusign was the undisputed king of eSignature.
They defined the category.
They were the verb—the ultimate signal of category domination.
They captured the lion’s share of market cap, revenue, and mindshare.
But by 2020, eSignature had become commoditized.
Microsoft bundled it.
Adobe bundled it.
Startups offered it for free.
Customers saw it as a feature—not a strategy.
Internally, the Docusign team could feel it.
They were still winning.
But they weren’t leading.
They had two choices:
Stay the kings of a declining category—
Or build belief in something bigger.
The Problem
Docusign realized the category wasn’t broken.
It had just stopped expanding.
There were over 500 competitors doing some version of eSignature.
The real issue wasn’t just signing.
It was everything before—and after—the signature.
Companies were spending billions managing contracts with disconnected tools:
| Redlining in Microsoft Word or Google Docs
| Negotiating via email
| Filing PDFs in cloud storage
| Manually tracking obligations post-signature
Agreements weren’t dynamic.
They were fragmented.
They were a mess.
Naming the Villain
Docusign named the villain: The Agreement Trap.
A world where mission-critical agreements are locked inside static files, disconnected from the systems that run the business.
To make the problem undeniable, they commissioned a study with Deloitte.
The results:
| 92% of organizations struggle to extract data from agreements.
| 85% don’t track post-signature obligations.
| Nearly $2 trillion in business value is lost or delayed every year due to agreement mismanagement.
This wasn’t a process problem.
It was a board-level risk.
The villain had a number. And it was massive.
The Decision: Burn the Boats
In early 2024, Docusign made a decision.
They wouldn’t just evolve their messaging.
They weren’t going to do a Repositioning (they had already tried that).
They would expand their identity.
At a company-wide all-hands meeting, President of Growth, Robert Chatwani, led the Burning of the Boats Ceremony:
“This is the next chapter in our journey.
“And there’s no going back.”
The team laid out:
| The problem: Fragmentation and PDFs everywhere
| The villain: The Agreement Trap
| The new category: Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM)
This wasn’t messaging.
It was a transformation.
And it was the moment belief moved to the entire organization.
The Lightning Strike: Momentum 2024
Docusign’s category launch culminated at Momentum 2024, their flagship event in Manhattan.
CEO Allan Thygesen, President of Growth Robert Chatwani, and CPO Dmitri Krakovsky stood on stage and declared:
“We spent the last two decades changing how agreements are signed.
“Now we’re changing how they’re managed.”
They didn’t launch features.
They launched a new category: Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM).
The keynote walked through:
| The scale of the Agreement Trap
| The vision for IAM
| Real-world use cases across sales, procurement, and legal
| The IAM platform: create, commit, manage
| Strategic integrations and data unlocks
The strike hit hard:
Analyst coverage surged.
The media reframed Docusign.
Strategic deal size grew.
And internally, the team aligned:
“We’re not the eSignature company anymore.”
Results
Investors responded.
A year after the strike, on their earnings call, CEO Allan Thygesen reported that 18% of revenue now comes from IAM.
The stock jumped 16%
Shares are up over 50% since the first Strike
Why?
Because investors know how rare it is for a company that defined the original category … to define the next one.
Intel didn’t create GPUs. NVIDIA did.
Google didn’t define Generative AI. OpenAI did.
Docusign did it. Under the pressure of the public markets.
The Escape Plan
| Recognize the shift – If your category isn’t creating demand, it’s time to reframe.
| Reclaim urgency – Quantify the next problem. Make it impossible to ignore.
| Mobilize the team – This isn’t messaging. It’s transformation.
| Strike with force – Don’t whisper a new story. Declare a new agenda for the market.
| Evolve before you’re replaced – The market will move—with or without you.
Play Bigger POV
You can’t dominate a category that’s stopped creating demand.
Legendary companies don’t just scale what they built.
They design what comes next.
They build belief again—at a higher level.
And they pull the market into orbit around a new problem, a new vision, and a new category.
Want to start a category movement? Let’s have a conversation.