Making a new category legible to the people who have to underwrite it.
Products can be positioned inside a category that already exists. You identify the language the market uses, establish where the product sits relative to the alternatives, and compete on the terms buyers understand.
In some cases, products have no category to sit in. The people who would need to underwrite them — liquidity providers, risk committees, exchanges, procurement teams, institutional allocators — have no framework for evaluating the product at all. They are not rejecting it, but they have no basis on which to accept it.
Creating an understanding is a harder problem than positioning, and a different kind of work. The work is less about what you say publicly and more about building the framework that lets a serious counterparty understand a product, assess it, and reach a decision.
Including, importantly, what it is not. Novel products get misfiled by default into the nearest familiar category, and the misfiling carries assumptions the product cannot satisfy. Getting the negative definition right is often more useful than the positive one.
Each type of counterparty evaluates through a different lens, and the same product has to be legible through all of them. A liquidity provider, a custodian and a risk committee are asking genuinely different questions, and a single explanation rarely satisfies more than one.
Working with internal stakeholders to define what the product is genuinely for, rather than what would be easiest to market this quarter. The work usually means interviewing people across the company and reconciling answers that turn out not to match.
The hierarchy that keeps your team, your investors and your partners describing the same product in the same terms. Novel categories drift fast, and the drift is usually visible to counterparties before it is visible internally.
USDi is a CPI-indexed digital currency. It is not a security and it is not a real-world asset — it is a store of value that behaves as a currency, and its total supply does not affect its price.
Almost every counterparty needed for USDi to function had no framework for the structure.
Much of the work was making the category legible to the people who had to underwrite it — building the explanation each type of participant needed, in the terms their own models use, so that a decision became possible.
The pattern is not specific to digital currencies. It appears wherever a product arrives before the category does, which describes a great deal of AI right now: capabilities that do not map to an existing procurement line, buyers with no established way to evaluate quality, and risk functions being asked to approve something their frameworks were never written for.
The technology differs, but the structural problem and the work of solving it do not.
A short call is usually enough to know whether this is a fit. If it isn't, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
Tell me what you’re building