The Category Science Of Category Pirates: A Below-Deck Look At The Weird Data That Drives Our Decisions And Path Forward
How we used Category Science to analyze our subscriber survey data and discover insights that will shape the future of Category Pirates.
Arrrrr! 🏴☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: Dive into an audiobook | Listen to a category design jam session | Enroll in the free Strategy Sprint email course
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
If you’ve been sailing with us for some time, you know Pirate Eddie is a Category Scientist.
Being the legendary Category Scientist he is, Pirate Eddie saw an opportunity to use data to understand you—our fellow Pirates—and course correct the Pirate Ship, if necessary. So he and Pirate Kat co-designed a survey and sent it out to all of you. (If you completed the survey, we sincerely thank you for your time and insights. *Raises glass.*)
Some of the data you shared met our expectations. But some of it surprised and inspired us, especially when we combined it with our Substack data.
Weird data for the win!
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” –Hunter S. Thompson
To give you a sense of how to find buried treasure in weird data, we’re going to share how we used Category Science to analyze the survey data and discover insights (from you) that will shape the future of Category Pirates.
Now, we’re not doing this to sing our own praises. Instead, it’s an exercise in drinking our own IPA—we much prefer this over “eating our own dog food”—in order to help explain the course we’re charting for the future. (Spoiler: We will continue to raise eyebrows and explore radically Non-Obvious waters. Arrrrr!)
Most importantly, we want to show you how to do Category Science on yourself by doing Category Science on ourselves.
Because conducting Category Science that focuses on Superconsumers is the fastest path to near-term growth—and to driving the word of mouth that builds legendary categories and brands.
By the end, a few of you will realize that you’re spending more than necessary for your ticket aboard the Category Pirate Ship. Others will learn why it might make sense to jump overboard. Above all, you will get a sense of the direction we’re sailing in and see what it means to make strategy adjustments by listening to your Supers. We hope both make you more excited than stumbling upon a rum cellar.
So get ready—it’s time to dive below the Pirate Ship. 🤿
The Category Science Of Category Pirates
If you haven’t heard of Category Science yet, we encourage you to read Category Science 101 to learn about the business-altering impact it can have before jumping into this mini-book.
A quick explainer: Category Science is a new category of data science. It’s not “better data analysis.” It’s broader and weirder data analysis.
What does that mean?
Most data analysis is very narrow and deep, just like the experts who conduct them. And it’s sure not looking for weird data. (In fact, most data analysts weed out outlier data.)
Consultants excel at analyzing data about a company’s economics.
Bankers/analysts are great at looking at the economics of existing categories.
Marketing gurus are great at looking at data about products, prices, and consumers.
Very few consultants, bankers, and marketing gurus sufficiently understand product, company, and category at the same time—even fewer like to be weird. But you need to deeply understand all three, and embrace the weirdness you find, to achieve The Magic Triangle. That’s where Category Science comes in. It’s the process of gathering and integrating data from all three sides to spot future exponential category growth opportunities.
You then use that data to create the future—or even predict the future.
This is about using a more scientific approach to something heretofore not considered science-able.
So, Pirate Eddie and Pirate Kat designed a Category Science survey to ask a balanced amount of questions about the Category Pirates product, company, and category. (For those interested, a mini-book on how to conduct Category Science surveys is on the ship’s manifesto and queue!) We then pulled data from additional datasets: our Substack to deep dive into our products and Stripe to understand our Superconsumers better.
And our Supers have spoken!
The Category Science helped us experience the following a-has:
Your personal and career outcomes drive our Net Promoter Score (NPS).
You need to see an outcome within 5.2 months, or else you jump overboard.
Our top mini-books have 5 factors in common, which is now our map for success.
That said, let’s break down these results and explain how our business decisions will impact you.