By playing, you agree to uListen's Terms and Privacy Policy and YouTube's Terms of Service.
Lenny's PodcastCategory creation and brand building | Barbra Gago (Pando, Miro, Greenhouse, Culture Amp)
Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.
Great conversations run long. Their best ideas don't have to.
uListen is free on iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and Claude.
See howAt a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
How Opinionated Brands Create New B2B Categories and Endure Globally
- Barbra Gago shares detailed lessons from helping build and reposition major B2B SaaS companies like Miro, Greenhouse, and Culture Amp, focusing on category creation, rebranding, and brand building.
- She explains when it makes sense to create a new product category versus elevating an existing one, and walks through the practical mechanics of doing so with analysts, directories, PR, and content.
- Barbra also breaks down how and when to rebrand, how to design a brand system rooted in company values, and why authentic, opinionated software can drive better outcomes and defensibility.
- Finally, she connects these ideas to her current startup, Pando, an “employee progression” platform aiming to replace traditional performance reviews with a more transparent, structured approach.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasValidate and name your category with the market, not just internally.
Use analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester), review sites (G2, Software Advice), and customer language to define and validate a category; a category isn’t ‘real’ until external platforms and competitors recognize it.
Only pursue category creation when budget, differentiation, and timing align.
If buyers already have a budget and mental model for an existing category (like ATS), it’s often more effective to elevate that category’s perceived value than to fight it with a new label that doesn’t stick.
Category creation is a long, content-heavy, PR-heavy investment.
You need sustained thought leadership, education content, and PR to convince buyers a new problem area exists and deserves budget—alongside working closely with directories to formally define the new space.
You can straddle old and new categories during a transition.
Successful companies like Miro and Pando sell into existing, understood categories (e.g., online whiteboard, performance management) while simultaneously seeding a bigger vision category (visual collaboration, employee progression) for the long term.
Rebrand early enough that your name can grow with your ambition.
If your current name is too literal or limiting for your future vision (e.g., RealtimeBoard), rebrand before you’ve over-invested in brand equity—ideally once you have product-market fit but before you’re very large.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesUltimately, you're not building a category until there is competition.
— Barbra Gago
Instead of spending the time and money to build a new category, we were going to spend the time and money to elevate the value of this category.
— Barbra Gago
When you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that.
— Barbra Gago
The product and the brand are the main things that will get customers and keep them.
— Barbra Gago
We’re taking on the big goal of killing performance reviews.
— Barbra Gago
Ask ChatGPT about this episode
Get its key ideas, plus a summary of each chapter linked to that point in the video, right in your chat.
Add uListen AI to ChatGPT.
Install uListen AI in ChatGPT (opens in a new tab)Needs a ChatGPT account.Paste this prompt into a new chat.
Use uListen AI to give me this episode's key ideas and a chapter-by-chapter summary, with timestamps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCEaUfZUuI0
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
