My First Million
The best business ideas come from noticing what's working and doing it better, faster, or for a different audience.
Movement-First Category Creation
A strategy for creating new business categories by building movements around ideas rather than products, making the category accessible to everyone including competitors.
How It Works
Instead of trademarking terms or making conferences company-centric, you create industry-wide movements. This spreads adoption faster because people put the term in job titles, job postings, and competitive companies participate in your events.
Components
Coin a term for the new methodology
Don't trademark the term
Create industry conferences/events, not company events
Allow competitors to participate
Focus on educating the market about the methodology
Build tools that naturally serve the methodology
When to Use
When you're creating a genuinely new way of doing something that could benefit from widespread industry adoption. Works best with methodology-based businesses.
When Not to Use
When your advantage is proprietary technology that shouldn't be shared, or when you need to maintain exclusivity for competitive reasons.
Anti-Patterns to Avoid
Example
“HubSpot coined 'inbound marketing' but didn't trademark it. Their Inbound conference focused on the methodology, not HubSpot. Competitors sent entire teams to learn. This made inbound marketing an industry standard, naturally positioning HubSpot as the leading tool.”