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Growth idea action plan

G2 category creation before category education sprawl

When buyers lack a clear category, help create the third-party category and seed it with reviews before publishing endless category-education content on your own site.

epic tactic medium budget Category Creation, Review Sites, SEO Stages: category creation, third-party proof, review generation, buyer education

Why this can grow a startup

Category creation is expensive when every page lives only on your own domain. Audiense had a sharper move: work with G2’s market research team to create the Audience Intelligence Platforms category, then collect reviews so buyers had a real comparison surface. That gives category education an external proof layer. Instead of telling the market that the category exists, the company helps build a place where buyers can benchmark vendors. This is useful for startups in fuzzy categories because third-party structure can make the market easier to explain and easier to search.

Ian's take

From scaling consumer platforms across MENA and Southeast Asia, my default is to distrust growth work that only looks good in a slide. For SEO and AI search, I care less about clever keyword tricks and more about clarity. A buyer, crawler, or answer engine should quickly understand who this is for, why it works, what proof backs it, and what page deserves to be cited. I would run it small enough to learn quickly, then only scale the parts that real users repeat, save, reply to, or buy from. For this tactic, I would watch one clear growth signal before putting more time or budget behind it.

Action plan

  1. Define one narrow startup segment where g2 category creation before category education sprawl can create a measurable lift.
  2. Turn the tactic into one offer, page, campaign, or workflow for the Category Creation and Review Sites channel.
  3. Use the evidence from sell.g2.com to set the first version of the message, format, and audience.
  4. Launch a small test for 7 to 14 days with one success metric: one measurable growth signal.
  5. Review the result, keep the winning message, remove weak variants, and turn the learning into a repeatable growth playbook.

Source-backed example

Audiense worked with G2’s market research team to create the Audience Intelligence Platforms category and then used review generation to seed the new category with customer feedback.

Source: G2 Case Study: Audiense (sell.g2.com)

GrowthDex source hub: G2 Case Study: Audiense

Last checked: 2026-06-07T06:26:26.000Z

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Ian Goh has helped grow consumer platforms across Southeast Asia, India, and MENA. His work includes scaling Tiki to 100M+ users, doubling BIGO's MENA revenue in 7 months, and increasing OYO's direct booking share across 6 Southeast Asian markets.

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