Create a Category Instead of Fighting for a Niche

What Everyone Says

Pick a niche. Find a wedge in an existing market, win a slice of it, then expand. It feels safe because the market is already proven. Buyers exist, budgets exist, you just need a better mousetrap. Most advice, most investors, and most accelerators push you toward a defined category with known demand.

Why That's Wrong

Sometimes the existing market is too small to win profitably, and nobody tells you to check that math first.

When Danny Jenkins sized the market for application whitelisting, the category his product fit into, the numbers did not work. "The size of the whitelisting market at the time... was potentially a few hundred million dollars." Worse, "in order to succeed it was going to cost us a hundred million dollars plus to run this service. So we would have to go and take 70% of the market." Winning meant dominating a small category at enormous cost. That is the hidden trap of "just pick a niche": you can win the niche and still lose.

What Danny Did Instead

Danny Jenkins, founder of ThreatLocker, changed the size of the market instead of fighting for a corner of it.

The trigger was a test. When the WannaCry ransomware hit, he ran his product against it and it blocked the attack cold. That was the moment the reframe clicked: "what if we change the size of the market? What if instead of trying to take a corner out of an existing market, we go out and create this entire new market, this entire new category."

So he stopped positioning ThreatLocker as whitelisting for big enterprises and repositioned it as zero trust for every business: "small businesses, for medium businesses, for businesses that are dynamic and change, airports and hotels and hospitals." A few-hundred-million-dollar niche became, in his words, a target "$10 billion market."

The result: ThreatLocker now protects 70,000 companies and is approaching $200M in revenue.

The Principle Underneath

A category is not fixed. It is a story about who the product is for and what problem it solves. When the obvious category is too small or too expensive to win, you can redraw its boundaries by changing the buyer and the use case, not the core technology.

This works when your product solves a problem far beyond the niche it was born in, and when the broader market genuinely cannot be served by incumbents. Danny added one rule that kept it honest: exclude anyone already served. "I cannot include someone who's already using... white listing." If you only win by expanding the definition, the expansion has to be real demand, not a slide.

Should You Do This?

Do this if your product solves a problem for a far larger group than the category it currently sits in, and the existing category is too small or too costly to dominate.

Skip it if you have not yet proven the product solves a real problem for even one buyer. Category creation is not an escape from a weak product. It is a move you make once the product works and the math on the obvious market does not.

One question to ask: if I won 100% of my current category, would the business be big enough? If the answer is no, you may be in the wrong category.