Play Bigger Authors Launch New Book For AI Startup Founders, Investors & Category Designers
You have friends & family. Then you have people you belong to. Who belong to you.
That’s Al Ramadan for me.
Today we launch the prequel to our first book, Play Bigger. This book is the one we should’ve written first.
You see. For almost a decade, something’s been bugging us.
We introduced Category Design to the world with Play Bigger.
We talked about all kinds of problems Category Design solves. But we never named the problem in its entirety.
The dudes who preach Frame, Name, & Claim the problem. Didn’t name (the whole) problem.
(Donkeys 🫏 !)
We made the same mistake (most) founders make. We’re entrepreneurs, creator capitalists, and category designers. But we made the mistake of falling (too much) in love with our product. 🤯
While preaching fall in love with the problem 😎
Call it a blind spot, call it creators loving their creation.
We call it fxcking funny.
But we (finally) saw it.
Welcome to:
The Existing Market Trap.
It’s what happens when you build something new.
And the market compares you to something old.
$5 Trillion in value was lost during the dot-com bust of the early 2000s.
Our primary category science research shows $13 trillion will be lost in The Existing Market Trap.
(Read that three times.)
More companies, careers, and capital will be lost chasing existing markets in AI. Than in any other new category in history.
It turns out.
You can’t create a new game.
Playing someone else’s old game.
But it happens every day in:
B2B and B2C
Seed to post-IPO
Startups and scale-ups
It’s what happens when you don’t change the way people think about their problems.
And you let the existing market define you.
From the very start, you’re playing a competition game.
From the very start, you’re playing a market share game.
From the very start, you’re shoving your new thing into an old aisle.
And once you’re trapped.
You’re trapped.
You burn cash without building belief
You fight uphill for attention, leads, and relevance
Your best people leave—because they want to work on something that matters
Brilliant teams with world-class products stuck in categories they didn’t create.
Fighting.
Losing.
As we revealed in Play Bigger, the Category King earns 76% of the economics.
So, unless you create a new market.
You will.
Get stuck.
Scratching for 24%.
That’s The Existing Market Trap.
Like Category Design itself, once you see it. You see it everywhere. And to help make the problem as clear as possible:
We mapped it.
Broke it down.
Into 13 Deadly Sins.
Patterns we’ve seen destroy companies, careers, and capital.
We built a system to help founders, CEOs, execs, and investors escape it.
Based on a lifetime of research, success, and failure working on designing the categories of the future with some of the greatest founders and VCs in Silicon Valley history.
The Existing Market Trap isn’t a storybook.
It’s a belief-building field guide.
A practical diagnostic.
And this one… this one is (very) personal.
You see.
10 years after Play Bigger, Al Ramadan and I got the band back together.
Along with two new band members Jason Wellcome and Mary Grice . Published by Category Pirates .
The Existing Market Trap is a labor of love.
Started by two guys who love each other.
But it wasn’t always like this.
After we launched Play Bigger, Al and I went in different directions.
We let dumb 💩 (and even dumber shit heads) get in the way.
We separated.
It sucked.
But the one thing we never lost was belief.
In Category Design, the problem it solves, and the mega difference it makes.
Because like the entrepreneurs we admire, we’re missionaries.
We never lost belief in the mission. Or each other.
Love is powerful.
So is belief.
That word (belief) is the heartbeat of our new Existing Market Trap book.
Belief is the most powerful thing you can build.
And most companies never do.
Belief in a different future is what creates legendary products, companies, & categories.
Most companies ship product.
Not belief.
If you’ve ever felt like:
You’re being compared to the wrong thing
You’re pushing uphill while others coast downhill
You’re building something great, but no one gets it
You’re not alone.
You’re not failing.
You’re in the trap.
The book we should have written before Play Bigger.
It already hit #1 on Amazon.
Short, sharp, and very real.
(It’s about 130 pages. You can read it in one sitting.)
Written for founders, CEOs, executives, creator capitalists and investors who want to create different futures.
(You've done dummer things with $20.)
Let me know what you think.
Our dream is that you don’t get stuck. That you’re not lost in the $13 Trillion.
And that Category Design helps you create the different future you dream of.
Because the future needs you,
Christopher Lochhead
🙏🏴☠️
Check out The Existing Market Trap on Amazon now.
I've done dumber things with $20k! This book would have saved me from that, already got my copy and read it many times.
Game changer!