Why growing your whole industry beats chasing market share

Simple. Not easy.

Most companies spend their energy fighting over the same customers. They obsess over competitors, shave prices, run comparison ads and celebrate when they steal a deal. The companies that end up dominating do something different. They make the whole pie bigger, then take the biggest slice of a much larger dessert.

I've watched this play out for years while building Ringba, and my position is now clear: if you're in a category with real headroom, growing the category is almost always a better bet than grinding out share points against direct rivals, because one path is a knife fight and the other is a land grab.

Let me walk through why, with actual numbers and names.

The math nobody runs

Say your industry is worth $500 million a year and you have 5% of it. That's $25 million. You can fight for another point or two of share, which is slow and expensive, or you can help the industry grow to $2 billion and keep the same 5%. The second path gets you to $100 million without winning a single head-to-head battle.

In practice, it gets better. The company doing the educating usually doesn't keep the same share. It grows share while growing the category, because buyers who learned about the category from you tend to buy from you. The 2016 book "Play Bigger" formalized this as "category design," and its central claim is worth sitting with: the company that defines a new category tends to capture the majority of that category's total value, often cited as two thirds or more.

Two thirds. Not two points.

Market share fights are zero-sum by definition. Every dollar you win, a competitor loses, and they'll fight you for it with everything they have, while category growth costs nobody anything because those new buyers didn't exist yet. Nobody fights you for educating them.

Who actually did this?

Plenty of companies. The pattern repeats.

HubSpot is the clean example. Starting around 2005 and 2006, they popularized "inbound marketing." They didn't position against ad agencies or fight established vendors on features. Instead they named a new way of doing marketing, taught it for free through blogs, certifications, and a conference, and by their 2014 IPO they owned the category they'd invented. Competitors who arrived later were using HubSpot's vocabulary and frameworks, on ground HubSpot had already defined.

Salesforce ran the same play earlier and arguably bigger. Their "No Software" campaign in the early 2000s wasn't really about Salesforce. It was about convincing businesses that cloud software was safe, sane, and superior to installed systems. They spent years evangelizing SaaS as a concept before most of their eventual competitors even existed. Category first, share second.

Drift compressed the playbook into about two years. Between 2016 and 2018 they named "conversational marketing," published a book on it, ran a conference, and built content around the idea rather than the product, so that when buyers finally searched for a conversational marketing tool, one company was synonymous with the term.

Notice what none of them led with. Comparison pages. Feature grids. That stuff came later, if at all.

Does the research back this up?

Yes, from two very different directions. Byron Sharp's "How Brands Grow" (2010) showed with empirical data that brands expand mainly by reaching new and light category buyers, not by winning loyalty wars. "Blue Ocean Strategy" (2005) made the strategic case for creating uncontested space instead of bleeding out in crowded markets. Different methods. Same conclusion.

Sharp's work matters because it isn't theory or consulting-speak; it's decades of buyer-behavior data across dozens of categories, and it keeps finding that the biggest brands got big by increasing penetration, reaching people who buy the category rarely or never. Loyalty programs and competitive conquesting produced surprisingly little.

Kim and Mauborgne came at it from strategy, with red oceans (existing markets where rivals fight over known demand until the water turns bloody) and blue oceans (new demand you create yourself). Their book has sold millions of copies since 2005, and yet most marketing budgets I see are still 90% red ocean.

Two independent bodies of work landing on the same answer. That's rare enough to take seriously.

What this costs, in real numbers

This part surprised me most, because category growth sounds expensive and often isn't.

A full category design consulting engagement typically runs $25,000 to $150,000 or more, real money for an early-stage company. But you don't need consultants. Sponsoring an industry conference usually costs $5,000 to $50,000 per event and puts you next to every serious buyer in the space. Co-marketing with competitors, and yes I mean actual competitors, through joint webinars or shared research reports costs a fraction of paid acquisition, and publishing the definitive educational content for your category costs mostly time and consistency, which most teams have more of than they think.

Compare that against B2B paid acquisition at $50 to $200 per lead. At $150 a lead, a $30,000 sponsorship needs 200 leads to break even against ads, and that ignores the awareness that compounds for years. Ads stop when you stop paying. A category you helped define keeps sending you buyers.

My own experience with this

I didn't arrive at this from books. I arrived at it from watching what actually moved the needle in the pay per call industry.

When we started Ringba, I could've spent every dollar telling people why our call tracking platform beat the alternatives. Instead, much of our energy went into making pay per call itself bigger and more legitimate: teaching how the model works, why calls convert differently than clicks, how to build sustainable campaigns. I eventually put that thinking into a book, The Pay Per Call Revolution, which exists to grow the industry, full stop. Every new person who enters pay per call because of it makes the market bigger for everyone, including companies that compete with us. Weird strategy, right? It works.

Here's what I'd tell any founder: when you educate the market, you become the market's teacher, and buyers trust teachers in a way that no comparison page you will ever write can hope to replicate.

It's a quieter advantage. But it holds.

FAQ

Doesn't growing the category just help my competitors? Some value leaks to them, yes. But the evidence, including the "Play Bigger" finding that category creators capture two thirds or more of category value, says the educator keeps a disproportionate share. You're feeding competitors crumbs while you eat the loaf.

What if my category is mature and not growing? Then this advice weakens, honestly. Category growth works when there's headroom of unaware or underserved buyers. In a genuinely saturated market, Sharp's research still applies: chase light and lapsed buyers before your rival's loyalists.

How long before category-building pays off? Plan on 18 to 36 months before it clearly outperforms paid acquisition, which sounds like forever until you remember HubSpot started in 2006 and didn't IPO until 2014. Drift moved faster, roughly two years from naming the category to leading it. Need pipeline this quarter? Run ads too. It's a both-and, not an either-or.

Where should I start if I have under $10,000? Skip the consultants. Write the single most useful educational resource in your niche, pitch a joint webinar to a non-hostile competitor or adjacent company, and put $3,000 to $5,000 toward one well-chosen event sponsorship. Measure inbound mentions of your category term. At adamyoung.com I write more about sequencing these moves. Start with the content. It's free. It compounds.