What is Category Pirates?
Category Pirates is the authority on Category Creation and Category Design.
Every Wednesday, we publish a newsletter for the radically different—who want to see, design and claim the future.
Topics include:
How to create new categories and redesign old ones.
The Magic Triangle, The 9 Levers, The Category Design Scorecard, and more frameworks for how to actionably create and design categories in the world.
Case studies for how successful companies have successful created and/or redesigned existing categories (and where other companies have gone wrong).
Motivational examples of the power of creating and investing in category creators such as Tesla, Netflix, Amazon, Airbnb, and more.
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“Why join the Navy if you can be a pirate?” - Steve Jobs
Meet The Pirates
Eddie Yoon has written more for the HBR on category strategy than any other person.
Eddie is the founder of EddieWouldGrow, LLC, a think tank and advisory firm on growth strategy. And a coCreator of Category Pirates 🏴☠️.
Previously he was one of the senior partners at The Cambridge Group, a strategy consulting firm. His work over the past two decades has driven over $8 billion dollars of annual incremental revenue. In particular, 8 of his clients have doubled or tripled in revenue in less than 8 years. Eddie is one of the world’s leading experts on finding and monetizing superconsumers to grow and create new categories.
He is the author of the book, Superconsumers: A Simple, Speedy and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth (Harvard Business School Press, 2016). His book was named as one of the Best Business Books of 2017 by Strategy & Business. He is also the author of over 100 articles, including “Make Your Best Customers Even Better” (Harvard Business Review magazine, March 2014) and “Why It Pays to Be a Category Creator” (Harvard Business Review magazine, March 2013). Additionally, he has appeared on CNBC and MSNBC and been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Forbes and has been a keynote speaker in the U.S., Canada, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, the UK and Japan. Eddie holds an AB in Political Science and Economics from the University of Chicago. Having been born and raised in Hawaii, he went to the Punahou School in Honolulu. Eddie lives in Chicago with his wife and three children.
Nicolas Cole is one of the most prolific digital writers in the world. His work has been consumed over 100 million times.
“Cole” as he’s known, is the cofounder of Digital Press and Category Pirates 🏴☠️. He’s been writing online since he was 17 years old.
Cole is a “Top Writer” on the massively popular question and answer site Quora. And his work has been published in TIME, Forbes, Fortune, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, Observer, Slate, Apple News, and more.
By the time he graduated high school, Cole had over 10,000 daily readers and had positioned himself as a powerful voice in the world of competitive gaming.
He’s first book was a smash hit. A memoir called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer, detailing what it was like growing up undiagnosed with celiac disease and at the same time becoming a nationally recognized gamer.
In addition to being an artist, author, and category designer, Cole teaches executives how to establish themselves and find their own unique voice online. He teaches leaders to them how to build their presence and how to gain a loyal following, and how to write content in a way that attracts massive attention and has the potential to be republished by major publications.
Christopher Lochhead is coAuthor of Play Bigger and Niche Down and a “godfather of category design”.
Lochhead is a #1 Apple Business Podcaster, #1 Amazon Marketing author, a category designer, and coCreator of Category Pirates 🏴☠️.
He hosts the award-winning dialogue podcast “Follow Your Different” and award-winning “Lochhead on Marketing” podcast and is co-author of two international bestsellers: Niche Down and Play Bigger.
The Marketing Journal says he’s “one of the best minds in marketing”, Podcast Magazine says he’s one of the worlds top business podcasters, NBA legend Bill Walton calls him “a quasar” and The Economist calls him “off-putting to some.”
Lochhead has been an advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups, is a venture capital limited partner and a former three-time Silicon Valley public company CMO (Vantive, Scient, Mercury Interactive), and entrepreneur.
Lochhead is a dyslexic paperboy who got thrown out of school at 18. With few other options he started a company.
Over 35 years in the entrepreneurial foxhole, he’s experienced the bliss of winning, the pain of losing, made a lot of friends, a few of enemies and learned to laugh about the whole thing. He’s raised venture capital, taken companies public, helped create billions in market cap, been part of countless M&A transactions, served on many boards, been on the cover of few magazines and has failed a lot, been publicly criticized, humiliated and fired. A bunch.
He thinks George Carlin was right, whisky is a good thing, The Ramones are legendary, Tom Waits is a gift, K.D. Lang and Leonard Cohen are angels, and that social media “influencers” and “hustle porn stars” are a scourge on the earth.
Lochhead lives in Santa Cruz, California with his wife, a flock of hens and three wild cats.
He has shared the microphone and stage with a wide-range legends like:
President Barack Obama, General Colin Powell, NBA Legend Bill Walton, General Stanley McChrystal, Navy Seal Chris Fussell, Billionaire Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Olympic Champion Kerri Walsh Jennings, #1 Legal Escort Alice Little, The “Real DEA Narcos” Steve Murphy and Javier Peña, CEO of The Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils Scott O’Neil, Netflix Founding CEO Marc Randolph, #1 technology analyst Ray Wang, UFC Champion Luke Rockhold, Category Creation Guru Eddie Yoon, 1st blind person to summit Mt. Everest Erik Weihenmayer, billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Hoffman, baseball legend Darryl Strawberry, billionaire entrepreneur Tom Golisano, Former #1 adult entertainment star Mia Khalifa, Stanford Prof. Margaret Ann Neale, Stanford Prof. Tina Seelig, NBA legend Andre Iguodala, 1-800-Got-Junk Founder Brian Scudamore, Cards Against Humanity Founder Max Temkin, Strava CoFounder Mark Gainey, billionaire entrepreneur Tom Siebel, UFC Hall of Famer Bas Rutten and,
Best-selling authors Dushka Zapata, Kim Scott, Hal Erod, Ken Blanchard, Tucker Max, Sebastian Junger, Kevin Maney, Amy Morin, Safi Bahcall, Scott Galloway, Jerry Colonna, Jules Pieri, Joe Pine, Ryan Holiday, Courtney Carver and countless others.
He’s been featured in/on:
Harvard Business Review, CNBC, CNN, Fox Business, Associated Press, The Economist, CBS News, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., Business Insider, and countless podcasts.