I find the structural forces reshaping your market, identify the category you should own, and build the language system that makes it impossible to misfile — for investors, press, partners, and your own team.
The world is reorganising faster than most companies can describe it. The categories that made sense five years ago are either collapsing into commodities, being absorbed by someone else's narrative, or becoming invisible to the buyers who need them most.
This is not a marketing problem. It is a category problem. And most companies facing it don't know that's what it is — because they're still describing themselves in the language of a world that's already ending.
The founder whose product keeps getting misfiled. Every investor conversation collapses into the same wrong comparison. Is this Airbnb? Is this a booking tool? The investor evaluates against the wrong things and passes.
The CEO of a company that has existed for twenty years, watching the world shift, knowing something fundamental needs to change — unable to name what, precisely.
The investor who keeps backing companies that can't explain what they are — and loses deals because the narrative collapses before the term sheet.
"Most marketing problems are strategy problems — rooted in an undefined, unclaimed category."
When a company burns through marketing leaders, loses investor meetings to "we don't understand your space," or watches competitors own narratives that should belong to them — the problem was never the messaging. The problem was the category that was never named.
Category confusion doesn't stay in the pitch deck. It spreads into every conversation the company has — with investors, press, partners, new hires, and customers. The cost compounds invisibly, until someone finally names it.
I work with founders, CEOs, and investors at the moment when the intuition is ahead of the language — when they know they are building something genuinely new, but the market keeps evaluating it against the wrong things.
What I do is structural, not creative. I map the forces reshaping your market, diagnose precisely how the market is currently misfiling you, and identify the category that sits at the intersection of those forces — unclaimed, precise, and ownable. Then I build the language system that makes it impossible to misfile again.
The methodology runs in five phases. Each phase produces the structural input the next one requires. The sequence is the methodology — skipping a phase produces speculation, not diagnosis.
Maps the structural forces reshaping your market — accelerating forces, friction forces, and the Tension Field where they collide. This is where new categories are born.
Names the category you're actually building — precisely, structurally, ownably. Plus the vocabulary system that makes it repeatable across every conversation.
Restructures the pitch, investor narrative, and audience-specific language around the category claim. The deck that makes investors want to see the movie, not read the manual.
Builds the proof system, category standard, and amplification architecture that makes the claim credible, defensible, and self-spreading beyond your own reach.
Where strategy becomes real inside the company. Department-specific language guidance for product, sales, marketing, and onboarding — so the category holds at every level, not just in the pitch deck.
Available after Phases 1 to 4
The right clients for this work are companies building something the market doesn't have a name for yet — or companies that suspect they are being evaluated against the wrong things, by the wrong people, with the wrong expectations. If that describes you, this is the work.
SplitStay · Travel-Tech · Pre-Series A
SplitStay is building a coordination layer for travel — helping compatible strangers match and share accommodation before a booking happens. The product is real. The pilot results are strong. The founder's intuition is sharp.
The problem: the market was filing SplitStay as a budget travel tool — evaluating it against Hostelworld and Couchsurfing, attracting the wrong investors, and collapsing every conversation into "is this Airbnb?"
The Force Intelligence Report diagnosed the misfile, mapped the structural forces producing the real opportunity, and named the category SplitStay was actually building — the one that had been invisible until it was named precisely.
"BlaBlaCar meets Booking.com" — a derivative analogy that filed a category-creating company as a follower of an existing model.
The entire travel industry was built on one assumption: that people arrive pre-coordinated. 150 million solo travelers were never part of that assumption.
Mass individualization ($550B solo travel market) colliding with the loneliness epidemic (WHO global health crisis) — the intersection no existing product has addressed.
"Every travel platform asks: where do you want to stay? SplitStay asks first: who do you want to travel with? That one shift changes everything downstream."
"The level of thinking and narrative depth genuinely exceeded my expectations. Those points landed very strongly because they articulate something I've been intuitively feeling around SplitStay for a long time, but never fully compressed into language this clearly."
Ruben Vanhees, Founder, SplitStay
LinkedIn case study post forthcoming · Ruben Vanhees at SplitStay · May 2026
The questions founders, CEOs, and investors ask before they understand what category work actually is — and what it produces.
Category strategy is the discipline of defining what type of company you are — not just what your product does. Investors, press, and customers can only evaluate a company against categories they already understand. A company that hasn't named its category will be evaluated against the nearest existing one, which is almost always wrong. That misfile has a direct cost: wrong investors, wrong press coverage, wrong partnership conversations, and a pitch that keeps collapsing into "is this like X?" Category strategy ends that.
Branding is about how a company looks and sounds within a category it already occupies. Category design comes before branding — it defines what the problem is, who it affects, and why existing solutions are structurally insufficient. A company that invests in branding before naming its category is building a beautiful identity inside the wrong box. Most rebrands that don't work failed at this step — they redesigned the exterior without resolving the structural question underneath.
The clearest signal is that every investor conversation collapses into the same wrong comparison. Other signals include: burning through marketing leaders without improving conversions; press coverage that consistently leads with the wrong descriptor; partners or customers who misunderstand what you do until halfway through a meeting; and a pitch that requires significant explanation before the opportunity becomes clear. These are category problems, not marketing problems. No amount of better messaging solves a structural misfile.
Narrative architecture is the structured language system a company uses to make its category real and repeatable — across investor conversations, press interviews, product onboarding, partnership pitches, and internal team alignment. It includes the category name, 8 to 12 owned vocabulary terms, the investor one-liner, the problem statement, and audience-specific articulations. Without narrative architecture, a company may know what it is building but cannot consistently communicate it in a way that the market can locate, understand, and buy.
The most common reason is that the problem is a category problem dressed as a marketing problem. When a company hasn't defined its category, marketing is asked to manufacture clarity that doesn't exist, communicate a strategy that was never fully defined, and convert buyers who don't understand what they're being asked to buy. No CMO can solve a category problem with marketing tools. The company cycles through marketing leaders while the underlying problem — undefined, unclaimed category — remains untouched. Hiring a CMO before naming your category is like hiring an interior designer before deciding which building you live in.
Positioning is the work of differentiating a company within a category that already exists — being the fastest, cheapest, or most reliable version of a known thing. Category creation is the work of defining a new category that didn't previously exist, making the old category feel structurally inadequate by comparison. For genuinely new companies, positioning without prior category creation produces a well-differentiated entry in the wrong box. The investors you want are not looking for the best version of what exists. They are looking for what exists next.
The engagement produces five concrete deliverables across five phases: a Force Intelligence Report (the structural map of your market's forces and Tension Field); a Category Diagnosis (forensic analysis of how the market is currently misfiling you); a Category Name and Vocabulary System (the precise claim you own, plus 8 to 12 defined terms); a Narrative Architecture document (pitch restructured, investor one-liner, problem statement, audience-specific articulations); and a Market Architecture (proof system, category standard, amplification strategy). The outcome is a company that knows what it is, can say it in one sentence to any audience, and has the language system that makes it impossible to misfile.
The full five-phase engagement runs over 12 to 16 weeks. Phase 1 (Force Intelligence Report) takes 2 weeks. Phase 2 (Category Naming and Vocabulary) takes 2 to 3 weeks. Phase 3 (Narrative Architecture) takes 2 to 3 weeks. Phase 4 (Market Architecture) takes 3 to 4 weeks. Phase 5 (Internal Translation) takes 3 to 4 weeks. Phases 2 and 3 together — the minimum viable engagement for a company preparing for a fundraising conversation — can be completed in 5 to 6 weeks. Each phase is deliverable-based and fixed fee, agreed in advance.
Yes — and often the urgency is higher. An established company that built its category position in a different world faces a specific and dangerous problem: category drift. The market is shifting, new entrants are naming new categories, and the company's existing description is gradually becoming someone else's legacy label. The work for an established company is not starting from scratch — it is diagnosing where the current category has drifted from the structural reality, identifying the inflection point the company is approaching, and building the language to reclaim a position before a new entrant does it for them.
I work with a small number of companies at a time. If you are building something structurally new, or if you suspect your company is being evaluated against the wrong things — reach out. The first conversation is a diagnosis, not a pitch.
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