137 - Pitfalls To Avoid When Designing Your Startup's New Category (Jenn Deering Davis, Co-Founder & Head of Marketing at Gradient Works)

What is up everyone? Sharing out another amazing episode with ya'll.

I asked Jenn Deering Davis to join me on the show. Jenn is Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Gradient Works. I actually first listened to Jenn talk to Cassidy Shield on the Stacking Growth podcast (always got my eye out for innovative early stage startups!) and I really wanted to bring her on because she has a lot of experience with category design which is a creative process in and of itself.

Prior to Gradient Works, Jenn co-founded Union Metrics, a social media analytics startup, that was acquired in 2018 by TrendKite and then TrendKite was acquired by Cision (a global media intelligence company).

Gradient Works was founded in 2020 and has 20 people. They've raised Seed funding ($2M total). Quick description: Right rep, right account, right time. Dynamic sales book management software to help sales manage their territories.

Here's what we hit on during the episode:

What does creative mean to you;

Cool creative approaches and experiments at Gradient Works;

How they built their audience before they had a product and now they get 20K inbound website visitors;

How the team builds creativity into how they work;

What's Jenn's advice on how to turn technical concepts into stories that help people understand each other;

Why they decided to design a new category at their early stage startup (HINT: it's never too soon);

Pitfalls to avoid when creating your startup's new category;

How to know that the category design process is working;

Why now is the best time for startups to get more creative;

Which startups should we be watching in 2023;

When has Jenn personally been the most creative;

Jenn asks Anna her burning question.

You can find Jenn on LinkedIn.

You can learn more about Gradient Works.

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