Unbounce chief strategy officer Tamara Grominsky says developing a category alongside a product increases the odds of companies finding product-market-fit and becoming winners.
In an interview for The BetaKit Podcast at SAAS NORTH, Grominsky notes that companies from early-stage to scale-ups struggle to introduce new products and hit product-market-fit. Grominsky argues that creating a category, which she defines as carving out a space or reframing an age-old problem, increases a company’s odds of achieving product-market-fit.
“It’s the age-old question, does the product come before the market and vice versa,” Grominsky told BetaKit Editor-in-Chief Douglas Soltys.
“It’s actually this idea of purposefully and mindfully … carving out a space for yourself, identifying a problem that maybe no one’s identified before, or reframing a problem in a new way,” she says. “Then you can nurture that category, create demand, and funnel that demand back to your product as you’re building that.”
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“If you want to be different from the competition then that is when category creation is for you,” she adds.
Grominsky has a breadth of experience in the marketing industry. In March, she was promoted from vice president of strategic growth to chief strategy officer at Unbounce, a Vancouver-based marketing software company. She has previously served in marketing roles at FreshBooks, Yellow Pages, and marketing agency Ideon Media.
Founded in 2009, Unbounce offers landing page and conversion optimization tech. It aims to allow marketers to build and test landing pages without a web developer. In June 2020, United States-based private equity firm Crest Rock Partners acquired a majority stake in Unbounce for $52 million.
Speaking with BetaKit, Grominsky claims Unbounce created the category for conversion intelligence, and she shares the company’s three-step process to hitting product-market-fit through category creation.
Grominsky goes more in-depth about the strategy in BetaKit’s podcast, and discusses how companies can effectively demonstrate their value proposition, how this cycle feeds into fundraising, and knowing when it’s worth the risk.