How to position for an emerging market.

(ie. when you’re creating a new category)

The key insight → New markets requires two different positioning strategies.

One strategy to bring people into this new market.

Another strategy to capture people in this new market.

Here is what this looks like in practice (using Root Signals as an example)

Background their product and market: They’ve built a tool that lets measure and test responses from LLMs. These programatic tests are called “evaluators” — you’d use them to make sure your AI product is generates high-quality answers.

Their potential market (TAM): Companies building AI in their products.

Your first thought might be: “Wow, thats a huge market opportunity”

And it is… but there's a catch:

Most of these companies ARE NOT actively building custom “evaluators”.

If Root Signals only positioned as “the best way to build evaluators”, most prospects would shrug:

“Evaluators? That’s not what we’re doing…”

But for a part of this TAM, the “emerging segment”, that exact message would resonate:

“Oh interesting! Here is how we’re doing this now…how is yours different?”

That’s why Root Signals needs two positioning strategies:

🔵 Product Positioning Strategy

→ Explains why they’re the best way to measure responses (build evaluators), with the goal of pulling them into their pipeline.

🟣 Market Education Strategy

→ Educates the broader audience on why evaluators matter in the first place, with the goal of pulling them into the market.

Here is what the educational message might sound like:

“If you are building AI agents, sending quality data to the LLM is not enough — you’re going to need a way to evaluate and optmize the LLM responses before you send the outputs to customers using your product. The mechanic of doing this is called an “evaluator, and the best AI products will have lots of them”

Notice this doesn’t pitch the product.

It connects to an adjacent best practice (curating inputs for LLMs) and extends the logic to a new need (evaluating outputs).

—

The takeaway:

Positioning in an emerging market isn’t just about “skating to where the puck is going”

You also have to meet people where they are now — and guide them into your new market.

This means running a two-headed positioning & GTM program: