Categories are lagging indicators
The most interesting companies are mispriced because there is nothing to price them against.
We keep an uncategorised stream on purpose. Forcing every idea into one of six buckets is how a desk misses the company that creates the seventh.
In practice this means developer tooling that changes who can build, simulation that replaces physical iteration, and coordination software for industries still running on email.
Price against the thing you remove
New categories have no comparable, so pricing has to be anchored to the cost of the failure the product eliminates. A simulation tool in our file tracked adoption almost exactly against the cost of one physical iteration: where a prototype cost thousands it was a nice-to-have, where it cost millions it sold itself.
Retargeting expansion by iteration cost rather than by team size roughly doubled its win rate. That is not a sales insight; it is a pricing model.
The category arrives after the customers
A coordination product we followed sold slowly until it stopped selling software and started quoting the cost of the coordination failure it removed. The category name showed up after the first ten customers — and once three competitors arrived, pricing power began eroding immediately.
That is the shape of the trade: buy before the name exists, be honest about what happens after it does.
The honest risk
Uncategorised often means unsold. A market that does not exist yet may simply not exist, and no amount of narrative fixes that. We give a thesis four quarters to produce a category name before we treat it as a hobby.
This post sits inside the Frontier software stream. The standing note holds the full thesis, bear case, and signal list.