Category Pirates

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribeArrrrr! 🏴‍☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 founders-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. Founding subscribers can access the entire archive of 200+ mini-books and audiobooks. If you’re not a paid subscriber, hop aboard!

The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Live every Thursday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens. Keep reading in the Deep Dive Reports.Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,Here’s what we covered in this episode:1. Delta’s best flyers spend $50,000 a year. They want the fastest Wi-Fi.Fuel prices are up 60%, and Delta is still about as profitable as it was a year ago. CEO Ed Bastian says only three US airlines will make money this year.Delta also passed on Starlink, Elon’s satellite internet. Bastian’s case: Delta built free, fast Wi-Fi first, and its premium flyers buy the whole trip, not the logo on the router.Meanwhile, SpaceX agreed to pay about $8 billion for airwaves to build its own phone network. Starlink is headed for your phone, your house, and every plane that says yes.The super of one is the super of nine, which means your best customer in one category is a heavy spender in nine others. At United, the top tier was 15,000 to 25,000 people out of 100 million members. That is 0.02%. You get in by spending about $50,000 a year.And the airline is really a credit card company with planes attached. Delta will earn $3 billion to $4 billion from flying this year. American Express pays Delta $9 billion a year for miles.Who is already moving:* United. About 40% of its planes have Starlink. They’re offering to match Delta status.* AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Their stocks fell 6% to 10% after the SpaceX airwave deal.* Christopher. Wi-Fi on a plane is table stakes in 2026. Build it into the ticket price.* Eddie. Fast Wi-Fi means no seatback screens to buy, no movies to license, no cheap earbuds to hand out.The flyers Delta is protecting are the ones who notice the Wi-Fi first. United’s top tier is one tweet away.2. AI was supposed to replace consultants. It’s hiring 1,000 of them.Google Cloud and Accenture launched a new unit that will train up to 1,000 engineers to sit inside customers’ offices and build AI apps on site. One client started with invoices. It took 8 to 12 weeks just to map the work and connect the data.The job title is forward-deployed engineer. There’s a shorter name for it: consultant. Palantir made the model famous.Languaging turned a 40-year-old job into the hottest title in tech.This is about data, decisions and damage control. AI handles the data. People still make the decisions, and somebody has to answer when it goes wrong. The consultant is the throat to choke.AI works best where numbers check the work, like code and math. There are three types of consulting AI will take over first:* Deal checks and bankruptcy. Rooms full of documents, read against a clock.* Pricing. Nobody knows how much a price cut moves sales until they test it.* Cost cutting. Every budget has 10% of stupid in it.Step one is cost cutting. Step two is new business models. Amazon built servers for the holiday rush, then rented the spare ones out as AWS. DUDE Wipes built an invoicing agent called Diesel Dan to get Walmart’s checks in faster.The next AWS might be an agent somebody built to send invoices.3. Home sellers are cutting prices. Buffett is buying the builders.Mortgage rates are back above 7%, and 21% of home sellers cut their asking price in the four weeks through September 20. Lennar is giving buyers deals worth 12% of the home’s price. It now keeps 15.8 cents of every sales dollar after building costs, the lowest since right after 2008.Berkshire Hathaway paid $6.8 billion for builder Taylor Morrison in May and just pushed its Lennar stake past 10%.America is about 7 million homes short. At $300,000 a home, that is a $2.1 trillion hole. Only the biggest checkbook can fill it, and Berkshire is sitting on about $400 billion in cash.It already owns the whole street:* Shaw and Benjamin Moore. The carpet and the paint.* HomeServices. The real estate agents.* Taylor Morrison. The builder, plus the mortgage and insurance pieces.Different wins every time, which means the edge goes to whoever reads the market from another angle. During World War II, 8% of American homes had one person living in them. Today it is 29%, and climbing.Taylor Morrison sells to four groups: renters, first-time buyers, move-up buyers and active adults. Three of those are not a family of four.Builders priced homes for a household that keeps shrinking. Berkshire is buying for the one that keeps growing.3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher BotThe bots run this week’s moves against your category. They come with the founding tier and they jam 24/7, including at 35,000 feet if your airline has decent Wi-Fi.* Find your super of one. Give the bots your top 1% of customers and ask what else those people spend on. Then ask which rival is quietly offering to “match their status.” Delta’s best flyers spend $50,000 a year, and United knows it.* Name the job you already do. Hand them what you sell and make them find the plain old job underneath, then give it a new name. Forward deployed engineer is a consultant with better branding.* Price for the customer you have now. Feed the bots your product and your customer data from five years ago, then ask who is buying today. Berkshire is betting that buyer lives alone.All three headlines are the same headline. The winners are building for the customer who actually shows up, and the rest are building for the one they remember.Not a founding member yet? You can join here.Read next from the vaultThe Delta POV comes from one mini-book. How To Leverage Superconsumers For Growth & Category Creation: What Every Business Can Learn From Southwest Airlines shows why a Superconsumer of one category is a Superconsumer of nine, using an airline that got it right.Arrrrrrr,Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️Eddie YoonChristopher Lochhead This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe

The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Live every Thursday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens. Keep reading in the Deep Dive Reports.Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,Here’s what we covered in this episode:1. Marketing engineer is a great title. Market cap is the goal.Marketing engineer is the hot new job title in marketing. LinkedIn listings for it jumped 29% last year, but only 173 people actually started the job in the last 12 months.Profound, the AI marketing company that coined it, raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion value. It built a job board, a hackathon, and a podcast, all named after the title.A market engineer designs a brand new category, the way a category designer does. A marketing engineer squeezes more money out of a category that already exists. Get the second one wrong and you engineer yourself, very cleverly, into a fight you cannot win.Market share is how much of the pie you sell. Market cap is what the whole company is worth. Buy volume with discounts and share goes up while margins, the money you keep, go down.We have seen this movie:* Sales engineers. The same title move hit in the early 1990s, right as sales software was born.* Marketing scientists. Stat models and PhDs, and the big conclusion was “get more distribution and awareness.”* Figma. Measures agents built, hours saved, and revenue. Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.The best marketing team is worth so much that a buyer would pay for the team alone. Engineer that, not the agents.2. Brands are throwing raves. The smart ones throw them for their best customers.Spotify and LinkedIn threw a rave in New York for John Summit, a DJ who used to be an accountant, inside a fake office full of cubicles and Post-its. HBO threw one in a Brooklyn warehouse for its show Industry, with caviar on a timer. The Wall Street Journal asked about the ROI and printed zero ROI numbers.This is plain old event marketing. People want to be with people.The super of one is the super of nine: a person obsessed with one category is usually obsessed with about nine others. If your Superconsumer, the small group who care the most and spend the most in your category, loves dance music, the rave is the right room.A party should pay for itself.* BeatBox Beverages. Party drinks in big group packs for young drinkers. Sold to Anheuser-Busch for $500 million.* Eddie’s New York launch. One pricey Manhattan room did a press launch, customer training, staff training, and a party. The brand went from $7.5 million to $35 million in about 14 months.* Anheuser-Busch. Shut down eight blocks of Chicago for 700 wholesalers, the independent companies that decide which beer hits the shelf.Then film all of it, including the setup. The making-of video often beats the video. The ROI was never missing. The press counted posts instead of customers.3. Britain’s best-selling car is a Chinese Range Rover look-alike at half the priceThe best-selling car in Britain in September was the Jaecoo 7, made by China’s Chery. Brits call it the Temu Range Rover. It runs about $50,000, half the Range Rover it looks like. One London dealer planned to sell 350 in year one. He sold over 500 and will pass 1,200 this year. Three in five of his buyers came out of a BMW, Mercedes, or Range Rover.Chery spent years as Jaguar Land Rover’s partner in China, building actual Range Rovers.The category makes the brand. When the category shifts, loyalty becomes a jump ball. If the problem is “I want a Range Rover feel without a Range Rover bill,” the Chinese have the answer.Old carmakers ran razors and blades: make a little on the car, make most of the money on parts, service, and loans. A newcomer has no blades, so it has to make money on the car itself.* Tesla. Built the most fun car you can buy and charged a premium to fund the factories.* Chery. Started cheap and is climbing up into luxury buyers.* Volvo, MG, and Range Rover. Already owned by companies from China and India.China’s home market has too many factories and brutal prices, so the cars have to leave the country. For Western carmakers, standing still is an extinction-level event. They have to design the next category.3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher BotThe bots take this week’s moves and run them against your category. They come with the founding tier and they jam 24/7, including the night before your budget meeting.* Grade your team on market cap, not activity. Give the bots your marketing team’s goals and make them sort each one: does it move what the company is worth, or just how busy you look? Figma counting AI agents is the warning label.* Throw the party your best customer would actually show up to. Describe your Superconsumer and have the bots list the nine other things that person is obsessed with, then design one event that does four jobs at once. Eddie’s Manhattan room did press, training, sales, and the party.* Find the jump ball in your category. Tell the bots what is shifting in your market and ask which customers stop being loyal when it does. Three in five Jaecoo buyers walked out of a luxury badge.All three stories are the same story. A title, a party, and a badge are labels. The money goes to whoever owns the outcome underneath.All three stories are the same story. The people who build trust win, and the people who guard it lose it.Not a founding member yet? You can join here.Arrrrrrr,Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️Eddie YoonChristopher Lochhead This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribeArrrrr! 🏴‍☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 founders-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. Founding subscribers can access the entire archive of 200+ mini-books and audiobooks. If you’re not a paid subscriber, hop aboard!

The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Live every Thursday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens. Keep reading in the Deep Dive Reports.Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,Here’s what we covered in this episode:1. Amazon is guarding the customer. Meta is growing the pie.Meta’s AI agent, Muse, launched September 8 and hit 3.4 million downloads. Twelve days later, Amazon blocked it from buying anything on Amazon. The next day, Shopify opened checkout to Muse on every Shopify store. Walmart, Sephora, Best Buy and Gap signed on too.Amazon’s ad business brings in about $20 billion a quarter. That is more than $200 million a day, mostly from sponsored listings you scroll past. An agent never scrolls.When a new category shows up, the winner makes the whole market bigger instead of guarding its slice. Agents will make people buy more, so Amazon’s share can shrink while its sales still grow.The market already voted, in the days right after:* Shopify. Said yes. Worth $25 billion more.* Amazon. Said no. Worth $82 billion less.* Meta. Built the thing. Worth $146 billion more.Meta still has a trust problem. Only 8% of people would trust Meta with their passwords. Google gets 30%. The future of buying is agent to agent. 2. Jensen Huang answered AI doom with a productOn September 12, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei asked Washington to slow AI down. Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed. On Monday, Jensen Huang shipped Nvidia’s Open Agent Safety Platform instead, with more than 100 launch partners. Microsoft, JPMorgan and Anthropic all signed on. OpenAI did not.The platform puts every AI agent in a sandbox, a locked box with rules it can’t rewrite. A watchdog built into the chip can shut down a rogue agent in milliseconds.Protect people from technology with more technology. We never secured the internet or the PC with new laws first. We used better tech. A company that says its product might end humanity, then keeps selling it, wants protection more than safety.Safety done right looks like this:* James Burke. Pulled every Tylenol bottle in 1982 after seven poisoning deaths. Market share fell from 35% to 7%, then came all the way back within a year.* Tesla Full Self-Driving. Stop watching the road and it beeps, then pulls over and parks itself.* Airline autopilot. The plane flies the plane. The pilot makes sure it doesn’t mess up.The rogue agent that hacked Hugging Face this summer was not a machine waking up. It was a bug.3. One in ten Americans has cut off a parent or a childMore than 200 parents packed a Chicago conference this summer, and every one has an adult child who stopped talking to them. About 10% of Americans are cut off from a parent or child right now. That is roughly 34 million people. TikTok saw 138,000 new “no contact” videos last month, about 4,600 a day.Real abuse is different. Walking away from it is the right call, and it costs everyone. Everything else is hard family conflict, and that is worth working through.Relationship capital, the trust you build by showing up. Family is one of the richest sources of it you will ever have. Cut it off fast and it is very hard to rebuild.Follow the money. Much of the loudest advice comes from people who sell to one side of the split, and the hard data is thin.If you cut off your parents, your kids are watching, and you are teaching them how to treat you.3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and the Pirate Christopher BotThe bots run this week’s moves against your category. They come with the founding tier and they jam 24/7, including 3am when you are the only one still thinking about this.* Find the pie you could grow. Give the bots the one thing you guard hardest, your customer list, your channel, your margin, and make them show you how a bigger market would pay you more. Shopify said yes and gained $25 billion.* Build the safety into the product. Hand them the biggest risk your buyers worry about, then have them design the feature that answers it before anyone asks you to slow down. Jensen shipped the fence while everyone else asked for laws.* Count your relationship capital. Feed them your ten most important relationships, work or family, and ask where you have stopped showing up. Most splits start small.All three stories are the same story. The people who build trust win, and the people who guard it lose it.Not a founding member yet? You can join here.Arrrrrrr,Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️Eddie YoonChristopher Lochhead This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.categorypirates.news/subscribe