Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
There’s a question about Category Design you’ve been carrying around.
It’s too specific for the books. It’s too niche for Google. And if you posted it on LinkedIn you’d get eleven answers from people who have never actually done the thing and probably generated an AI answer.
So you asked Claude. It gave you something confident, well-organized, and completely average.
And you’re still carrying the question.
And a question like that?
There are maybe five people alive who can answer it properly, and two of them invented the vocabulary you’re using to ask it.
Not a coach who read the books.
Not a consultant who took the framework and renamed it.
The people who wrote it, live, in front of you, jamming on your business.
And a question like yours doesn’t get answered in a paragraph anyway. It gets answered after somebody asks you three questions back.
That’s the thing no bot will ever do for you. It answers the question you typed. It never stops to ask what you actually meant, because it doesn’t know your business well enough to notice the question is slightly wrong.
In a live room, that’s the first thing that happens.
You’re invited to our next Founder-only Ask Me Anything.
This is the one to clear your calendar for.
On Friday, August 28, at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET, we’re hosting our next live Founder-Only AMA with Pirate Christopher, Eddie, and Bri.
You ask, we jam, and we don’t leave until we’ve done everything we can to get you somewhere.
We promise an hour. (We have never once finished in an hour.) These regularly run over because there is nothing more powerful than learning in public.
👉 Become a Founding Member and join the August 28 AMA →
But wait, there’s more!
There’s one thing that makes August 28 different from every AMA we’ve run.
We’re kicking around a new book.
We’re not telling you what it is in this email.
We want your first reaction to be a live one. Unrehearsed, out loud, before you’ve had time to be polite about it.
So we’re bringing the idea to the room on the 28th, putting it in front of you, and asking one question: is this worth writing, or do we walk it off the plank?
If you’ve ever wanted to see behind the writing, this is behind the writing.
And this isn’t the last Founder-Only AMA we host.
Starting in September, the AMAs will be monthly.
Until now, getting in a room with us live meant one of two things.
You were in the Academy, or you got lucky and caught a one-off workshop.
That changes in September.
Every 2nd Friday, we’re running a monthly Founder-Only AMA.
There’s no new tier. We’re not upselling you. And we’re not changing the price.
If we were running the standard playbook, this would be its own product. We’d name it something, wrap it in a landing page, price it higher than the Founding Membership, and sell it to you separately. That’s what everyone does with live access, because live access is the most expensive thing anyone can hand you. It’s the one thing that can’t be recorded once and resold forever.
Instead, we’re putting it inside the Founding Membership at the price it already is.
Which means two things:
If you’re already a Founding Member, you don’t pay a penny more (you’re already grandfathered in at the price you paid), and now you get to join monthly calls with the Pirates.
And if you’ve been circling the Founding Membership for a while, there has never been a better week to stop circling.
Here’s how the monthly Founding-Only AMAs will work.
If you’ve been in the room with us before, you’ll know that most of our jam sessions are freeform.
You show up. Ask a question. We jam it out under the Category Design POV.
The Founding-Only AMAs will have a new format. You’ll submit your question ahead of time. We’ll pull the most asked ones and answer them live with you in the room.
Which makes August 28 the last free-for-all.
Show up with nothing. Show up with something half-formed you’d be embarrassed to write down. Change your mind mid-sentence and ask a different thing instead.
Starting in September, the calls will only be an hour and will only answer a few pre-submitted questions.
Founders, watch your inbox next week. We’re building a new home for all of this, and your exclusive invite is coming.
One place to add every call to your calendar, submit your question before each one, and one central spot to access everything your subscription includes.
If you’ve been circling the Founding Membership, here’s what’s on the other side.
Some of you have been reading us for years.
You’ve watched other people’s names show up in these emails with numbers attached. Sylvia, who found her category inside her own sentence and had a hundred-thousand-dollar deal on the table. Melissa, who walked into a conference with sharper languaging and walked out with sales. Jessica. Rob. Jennifer.
You read those and thought some version of good for them, and then you went back to your week.
You already believe this works. That was never the question. The question was when.
If you believe in Category Design. And you believe now is the time to create and dominate your category. The Founding tier is your next step.
Here’s everything that comes with Founding, starting the second you join:
Every mini-book we’ve ever written. 300+, the full archive, immediate access.
50+ audiobooks, for the drive and the walk and the gym.
Digital copies of all seven of our big books, Creator Capitalist, The 22 Laws of Category Design, Snow Leopard, Thinker’s High, and more.
The Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher Bot. They interrogate your strip the jargon out, and keep shoving you off “better” toward “different.” It’s the closest thing to having us across the table at 11pm when the pitch still isn’t right.
The PSJ Deep Dives. Every other Friday, we make the call the business press won’t: where the category goes next. Founders only.
And now, a live call with us every month, starting in September.
That last one is why today is different from every other day you’ve thought about this.
Everything else in that list waits for you. The archive isn’t going anywhere. The audiobooks will still be there in March. You could join in two years and binge the entire thing.
The call is the only part that has to be attended to exist.
👉 Become a Founding Member and join the August 28 AMA →
Join today, and you’re in the room on August 28 for the last free-form, and in the room for every AMA after it.
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates
Pumped for these to continue!!