A founder reached out to me on LinkedIn recently with this question: "I'd be interested to hear how you approach positioning for companies creating entirely new categories rather than competing in established ones."
It's a great question. That’s why I decided to write this article. And the honest answer is one most GTM advice completely misses, because most GTM advice is built around marketing knowledge, when what category creators actually need is something different; it’s commercial judgement.
These two are not the same thing.
Marketing knowledge tells you how to communicate what exists. Commercial judgement tells you what a buyer needs to hear before they say yes with budget, not just interest.
That distinction matters enormously at pre-seed and seed stage. Because when you're creating a category that doesn't yet exist, you're not asking buyers to choose you over a competitor. You're asking them to recognise a problem they haven't named yet, believe it's worth solving, and trust that you're the right team to solve it. That's a commercial ask, not a marketing one.
Most early-stage GTM advice optimises for the wrong output. It optimises for awareness, for content engagement, for positioning clarity. These things matter. But for a category creator, the first question isn't "how do we communicate this?" It's "what does a buyer need to understand about this problem before they'll put a budget behind solving it?"
If you've never owned a revenue number, never sat across from a board member and had to justify why this problem deserves a line on the budget, you don't feel the difference between those two questions. You know one intellectually. You know the other in your bones.
Here's the thing pre-seed category creators are not told clearly enough.
The language you use to describe the problem you solve isn't a positioning exercise. It's a fundraising accelerator, and a commercial one.
When your early users adopt your language to describe their own problem, two things happen simultaneously. First, you have proof the category is real. This is proof that a human being, unprompted, reached for your framing to explain something they were struggling with. That's not a marketing win. That's a commercial signal that a problem is real enough to pay for. Second, investors can pattern-match. When a founder can walk into a seed conversation and say "here are twelve people who described this problem using the same words, and here's what three of them have already paid to solve it", the funding conversation changes entirely.
CB Insights data shows 33% of startups fail because they solved a problem nobody had. For category creators, the failure mode is slightly different and more subtle: they solved a problem that exists but that nobody had language for yet, and the commercial work to give it that language never happened.
At pre-seed, you have no brand, no reputation, and no budget. What you have is the product, and for category creators, the product is the entire GTM motion. Everything else is noise until you've proven the category problem is real and that real people will pay to have it solved.
Practically, this means:
What this process actually takes:
For companies creating new categories, the realistic timeline from first working prototype to a credible seed raise is 18 to 24 months (longer than the general 12 to 18 month median) because you're not just proving the product works. You're proving the problem exists and that people will pay to have it solved.
Seed investors want to see specific proof points. Not just traction numbers but commercial signals:
The median pre-seed round in 2026 sits at $750K to $1.5M at a $4M to $6M post-money valuation. That capital exists to prove one specific commercial thing, not to go figure it out.
Once you have activation signal and early users who've adopted your category language, the GTM motion starts to compound, but only if it's built around commercial outcomes, not marketing outputs.
This is where PLG becomes a revenue engine rather than just an onboarding mechanism. The data is clear: PLG companies grow 50% faster on 39% less sales and marketing spend. Products using Product Qualified Leads convert at 25 to 30% compared to 5 to 10% for Marketing Qualified Leads. The difference is commercial instrumentation, that’s knowing which user behaviours predict revenue, not just retention.
Practically at seed stage:
The seed round benchmarks to aim for: $3M to $3.8M median raise, with investors expecting $250K to $3M in revenue run rate growing 15 to 30% month on month, and a LTV:CAC ratio of 3:1 or higher.
There's one question I come back to with early-stage founders building new categories, and it's a commercial question, not a marketing one.
Not "how do we explain what we do?" But: "what does a buyer need to understand about this problem before they'll put budget behind solving it, and are we building our GTM around getting them there?"
Get that question right at pre-seed, with the commercial clarity it deserves, and the rest follows: the category gets named, the right users activate, the language spreads, the raise happens.
Get it wrong, and optimise for marketing outputs instead, and you'll have a well-positioned product that nobody has budget for.
Stats sources referenced:
CBB Insights, Top Reasons Startups Fail, 2026
Waveup, "Startup Funding Stages 2026: Pre-Seed to IPO", May 2026
Pitchwise, "The Complete Guide to Startup Funding Rounds in 2026", June 2026
Capwave, "Pre-Seed vs Seed Funding: What's Actually Different in 2026", April 2026
Digital Applied, "PLG vs Sales-Led GTM: 2026 Motion Decision Framework", June 2026