Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm reveal a groundbreaking business strategy called category design.

Winning today isn’t about beating the competition at the old game. It’s about inventing a whole new game—defining a new market category, developing it, and achieving market domination over time. You can’t build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you’re going to lose.

In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of “category kings”—the legendary startups and companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA—that give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, often solving problems we didn’t know we had.

In Play Bigger, the authors assemble their findings to introduce the new discipline of category design. By applying this framework, companies can unlock explosive business growth, create new demand where none existed, and condition customers’ brains so they change their expectations and buying habits. While this discipline defines the tech industry, it applies to every kind of industry and even to personal careers.

Crossing the Chasm revolutionized how we think about new products in an existing market. The Innovator’s Dilemma taught us about disrupting an aging market. Now, Play Bigger is transforming business once again, showing us how to create the market itself.

This playbook for entrepreneurs, founders, and executives reveals:

• A New Business Strategy: Learn the discipline of category design, a proven framework for building a legendary business that creates and dominates its own market.
• The Category King Playbook: Discover why companies that create new categories—the “category kings”—capture over 76% of their market’s value, and how you can become one.
• Different is Greater than Better: Understand the critical mistake most companies make: focusing on having the “best” product while losing to competitors who build a “different” and legendary category.
• A Guide to Entrepreneurship: Whether you’re a founder of a new startup or an executive in a Fortune 500 company, learn the strategies used by Silicon Valley’s most successful companies to create new demand and redefine industries.