Why Founders Who Wait Around for a Playbook End Up Following One

I remember the first time a retail buyer looked at our products, paused, and asked me: “Where do I even put this?”

Not the category. Not the section. Where. Do. I. Put. This?

That question told me everything I needed to know about the business problem I was solving. I was building Mitra9 in the functional beverage space around Kava and Mitragynine ingredients that most people either hadn’t heard of or actively misunderstood. I wasn’t competing for shelf space; I was competing against confusion itself. Even buyers who were familiar with the ingredients had never seen them offered in a ready-to-drink format before.

Most founders entering an unstructured market see the absence of rules as freedom. I did too. But what I learned is that freedom without clarity creates something harder to overcome than any competitor: doubt. Doubts from retailers and doubts from consumers. And if you let it, that doubt can spread to your own team, making them question whether the category will ever mature enough to truly matter.

Five years in, I’ve learned that the founders who last in emerging categories aren’t the ones who move fastest. They’re the ones who reduce confusion fast enough to stay alive while building credibility that compounds. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Set your own standards, before anyone forces you to

In established industries, standards are already baked in. In emerging ones, they’re being written in real time and whoever writes them first has the advantage.

Early on, I made the decision to operate as if the highest level of regulatory scrutiny already existed. That meant treating sourcing, testing and consistency as non-negotiable, not aspirational. It felt like the industry was hiding in the shadows while Mitra9 was front and center.

The most concrete example: we implemented a strict 21+ policy on all Mitragynine products before it was required. That decision cost us real volume. There were competitors moving products to anyone willing to buy, and we were walking away from those sales deliberately. I’d make that call again. Because when buyers and regulators started asking harder questions and they always do eventually we had answers ready. Not scrambled together. Ready.

The lesson isn’t specific to beverages. If you’re operating in a space without clear standards, the question isn’t whether standards will come. They will. The question is whether you helped shape them or got shaped by them.

Make education part of the product, not an afterthought

Traditional marketing assumes people understand what they’re evaluating. In a new category, that assumption will sink you.

Consumers standing in wellness aisle are making split-second decisions. If they pick up your product and can’t immediately answer “what is this and what will it do for me,” they put it down. Not because they don’t want it, but because they don’t understand it. In a crowded aisle, confusion defaults to the familiar.

We rebuilt how we thought about the first-time shopper experience from the ground up. Packaging language, retail staff conversations, how we framed the category in every external touchpoint, all of it was designed to reduce friction, not generate excitement. Excitement follows understanding. You can’t market your way past confusion.

The goal was to never over-explain. It was to make someone feel in control of their experience before they ever tried the product. That distinction matters more than most founders realize.

Be clear instead of persuasive

In a new category, there’s enormous pressure to over-position. Stack enough messages together, the thinking goes, and something will stick. What happens is you make the product harder to understand, not easier.

We made an early decision to hold onto three things: define what the product is, define where it fits, define what someone should expect from it. That’s the entire brief. We refused to chase trend cycles even when it would have driven short-term attention because borrowed relevance doesn’t build repeat purchase behavior.

Did that strategy generate immediate buzz? No. It generated lower confusion rates, which translated directly into higher repeat purchase rates. Math is simple: if someone doesn’t understand you the first time, they rarely come back to figure it out.

Build for where things are going, not where they are

Early flexibility in emerging categories is real, but it’s also temporary. Retailers eventually ask harder questions. Consumers get more sophisticated. Regulators catch up. The founders who treat the early period as an indefinite runway tend to get caught flat-footed when the rules arrive.

From the beginning, I was asking a different question than most operators in the space: not “what works now” but “what still works in five years when this category matures?” That shaped everything from how we approached formulation and supply chain documentation to how we maintained active ingredient consistency across production runs.

The operational commitment: the 1,000th can had to taste and perform identically to the first. That level of internal documentation isn’t exciting. It’s what makes our retailer conversations different from most of our competitors’. We have the receipts. When a buyer asks about sourcing or testing, we’re not assembling an answer we’re pulling from a system we built years ago.

Infrastructure built under pressure is always more expensive than infrastructure built in advance. The founders who survive category maturation are the ones who started building for it before it arrived.

Treat trust as the main growth engine

Getting a product into someone’s hands for the first time is a distribution and marketing problem. Getting them to come back is a trust problem. Most brands in emerging categories obsess over the first and underinvest in the second.

The data we saw was consistent: when a consumer understood the category clearly and had a product experience that matched what we told them to expect, they came back. When there was a gap, even a small one between expectation and experience, they usually didn’t. Trust isn’t a feeling, it’s a gap measurement.

The same principle is held in our B2B channel. Retail buyers who clearly understood how to position our products made restocking decisions with confidence. Buyers who were uncertain about the category stalled. Your product’s velocity on a shelf is partly a function of how well the person managing that shelf understands what they’re selling.

Trust is built through consistency: consistent product, consistent messaging, consistent behavior across every touchpoint. It compounds slowly and breaks fast. Treat it accordingly.

The absence of a playbook is a positioning decision

When I look back at the retail buyer who asked where to put our product, I don’t remember it as a hard moment. I remember it as clarifying. She wasn’t rejecting the product. She was telling me exactly what work remained.

Emerging categories reward the operators who treat ambiguity as a design problem, not a waiting problem. The lack of standards, the confused consumers, the skeptical buyers aren’t obstacles to building a real business. They’re the conditions under which durable businesses get built, because they filter out everyone who needed the path to be clear.

By the time a category has a playbook, you’re either the one who wrote it or the one who has to follow it. There’s no third option.