Welcome to First to Market
A startup called Greenhouse spent years trying to build a new category called ‘recruiting optimization.’ It never took and they ended up retreating to revive a category that already existed.
Every Friday I publish an article that combines strategy + tactics to avoid those types of mistakes and outmaneuver the incumbents.
Written by Andrew Garberson, someone living it each day as head of marketing at Recurrent.
Is this for you?
I write with marketers and founding teams in mind, but the frameworks apply to anyone building in emerging markets or categories.
You’ll find this useful if you’re:
Trying to create demand
Educating skeptical buyers
Competing against “doing nothing”
Explaining things that people don’t yet understand
Building trust in new markets
Whether you’re launching a B2B product, positioning a service or entering an emerging market, the approaches are often similar: market education beats traditional advertising and marketing playbooks.
The Research
Each article is backed by a proprietary category research database.
Want your own category read? The Four Waters Assessment is free for subscribers. Tell me about your company and I’ll send back a written assessment of where your category sits and what to borrow from similar companies in other categories.
About Me
I’m Andrew Garberson, Head of Marketing at Recurrent, the industry standard for EV analytics.
I’ve spent 15 years building growth strategies in emerging categories: B2B SaaS, consumer tech, and clean tech. I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that the tactics that work in mature markets can crush you in new ones.
I work with a small number of companies a year on category formation, and I occasionally invest at pre-seed and seed in emerging categories. If that's relevant to what you're building, reply to any issue or send me a message here.
