The one book I buy people when they say they want to start a business

How They claimed It - Vol. 04

In 2016 I was running a region for someone else’s company.

Good job. Good money. Not my thing.

Then I read Play Bigger.

I remember sitting with it thinking, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to do without knowing what to call it. I didn’t want to build another adjuster training company. I wanted to build something that didn’t exist yet. A category nobody had named.

I went back to work Monday morning thinking differently.

A few months later I started IA Path.

From day one I built it the way Play Bigger described.
Not better than the competition.
Different from the competition.

I named a category, Virtual Adjuster Mentorships, then evolved it into EXP Free Career Paths. I stopped talking about training and started talking about a new way to start an insurance career without the experience requirements that kept everyone else stuck.

People started calling me the auto guy.

Others tried to copy the model. Most couldn’t figure out why it worked for me and not for them. Some customers complained we were the only option in our space.

That last one is how you know category design is working.

Here’s what Play Bigger taught me that no other business book had:

The goal isn’t to win the competition.
The goal is to make the competition irrelevant by creating a category they can’t follow you into.
If they do follow you into it they are playing by your rules.

Most businesses design a product. Some design a company. Almost nobody intentionally designs the category at the same time.

That’s the Magic Triangle, company, product, and category designed together simultaneously. Whoever aligns all three first becomes the category king. And the research behind Play Bigger showed that category kings capture 76% of the market. Everyone else splits the remaining 24%.

The math on competing suddenly looks very different.

Four authors wrote this book together.

Al Ramadan, Christopher Lochhead, Dave Peterson, and Kevin Maney. They used category design to write the book on category design, as I write a category publishing article about it, which is about as meta as it gets.

The book itself was their lightning strike.

They’ve gone on to do different things since.

Christopher Lochhead🏴‍☠️ built Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️, the newsletter and podcast empire that has become required reading for anyone serious about category design.

Al Ramadan runs Play Bigger advising founders and CEOs on how to apply the framework at the highest level.

Kevin Maney just released a new book on category design and runs a consulting firm around it. They’re not all in the same room anymore, but they’re still the dominant force in the category they created.

Nobody has displaced them.
Nobody is close.

That’s what happens when you write the book on the category.

You don’t just lead it at launch. You lead it permanently.

This is Vol. 04 of How They Claimed It, the series where I break down how the books that changed my thinking actually claimed their categories and what it can teach us about how we can do the same in our own categories.

Named it.
Framed it.
Claimed it.

The Category Publishing Law applies every single time.

The person who writes the book on a category gets remembered as the leader of it.

Coach Chris

P.S. Play Bigger is still in print. Still relevant. Still the best single book on why competing is the wrong game. If you haven’t read it, read it. If you have, read it again. I’m on my 10th pass.

It’s the foundation I’ve built the concepts of Mini Books and Category Publishing on… you won’t regret reading it.