Drift and the Category That Didn't Exist Yet: How Conversational Marketing Was Invented
Drift launched into a crowded B2B sales tool market and decided the only way to win was to stop competing in an existing category and create a new one. 'Conversational marketing' didn't exist before 2016. Drift spent three years making it the only term that mattered.
There’s a particular torture familiar to anyone who has ever tried to buy enterprise software: you’ve done your research, you know what you want, you navigate to the vendor’s website, and you hit a wall. Name, email address, company name, company size, job title, phone number. Maybe a field asking how you heard about them. Submit. Now wait for a sales representative to call you back, possibly today, possibly next week, probably at an inconvenient time. The product you want to evaluate is right there. The person who could sell it to you exists. But the process insists on a form, a wait, and a scheduled call that both parties approach slightly warily.
David Cancel thought this was absurd. More importantly, he thought it was an exploitable absurdity — the kind of universal pain point that, if you named it clearly enough and offered a compelling enough alternative, could become the foundation of a category.
The Context
Cancel and his co-founder Elias Torres launched Drift in 2015, officially releasing the product in 2016. Both had been through the B2B software industry before. Cancel had founded multiple companies and served as CPO at HubSpot; Torres had been a VP of Engineering at HubSpot as well. They understood, from the inside, how the lead generation machinery worked. They also understood how buyers experienced it, which is to say: not well.
The B2B lead capture model in 2015 was a downstream consequence of how marketing attribution worked. Marketing teams needed to know where their leads came from, so they needed leads to register through a form that could be tagged to a source. Once the form existed, it became a gate: you couldn’t get to the content, the demo, or the conversation without surrendering contact information first. This made perfect sense from a systems perspective and was genuinely annoying from a human perspective.
What had changed by 2015 was that consumer chat had become ubiquitous. WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and Slack had trained a generation of professionals to expect immediate, asynchronous, conversational communication. When someone needed help from a consumer company, they expected to be able to chat. B2B software companies, operating under a different set of incentives, hadn’t made the same transition. The gap between consumer communication norms and B2B buyer experience was widening.
Drift’s insight was to treat that gap as a category opportunity.
The Campaign
The strategy had three interlocking components: name the category, prove it with content, and demonstrate it with the product itself.
Naming the category came first. Cancel and his team coined “conversational marketing” as the term for what they were selling: a model where website visitors could have real-time conversations with chatbots or sales representatives instead of filling out forms and waiting. They published the term aggressively, consistently, and across every channel. Blog posts, podcast appearances, conference presentations, Twitter threads — Cancel was prolific and specific. He wasn’t just saying “chat is good for B2B.” He was saying “conversational marketing is a distinct discipline with its own principles, and here’s what they are.”
The Conversational Marketing book, co-authored with Dave Gerhardt, arrived as a formal codification of the category. Published in 2019, it followed the playbook that HubSpot’s founders had used with “Inbound Marketing” more than a decade earlier: put the category’s definition between covers, distribute it broadly, and make the author’s company synonymous with the category. The book became a bestseller in its Amazon category and gave sales teams a physical artifact to put in front of prospects. It also gave journalists and analysts a reference document that kept surfacing Drift’s name in coverage.
The HYPERGROWTH conference served the same function that Dreamforce served for Salesforce and INBOUND served for HubSpot: it created a recurring annual moment where the community gathered around a shared identity. HYPERGROWTH sold out multiple years running and attracted speakers from across the B2B growth and marketing world. For a company that was only a few years old, the conference was a statement of category leadership that attendance figures made hard to argue with.
The most audacious move was the product decision. In 2016, Drift deleted the contact forms from its own website. Visitors who wanted to reach Drift couldn’t fill out a form and wait. They had to use the chat interface. This was either a brilliant brand statement or commercial suicide, depending on who you asked. Cancel understood it as both a business decision and a marketing one: if you’re building a company on the premise that forms are broken and chat is better, you’d better be using chat yourself.
Why It Worked
Category creation requires a combination of insight, timing, and relentless consistency. Drift had all three.
The insight was real: the form-fill model created genuine friction, and buyers would welcome an alternative. This wasn’t a manufactured problem. Cancel could point to his own experience as a buyer to illustrate it. The category wasn’t invented out of thin air — it was named for something that was already frustrating people.
The timing was right because chat infrastructure had matured. Building B2B chatbots in 2010 would have required significant engineering investment for a user experience most buyers found primitive. By 2015, the technology was reliable enough to deliver on the promise. Consumer chat familiarity meant buyers arrived with correct expectations for the interaction model.
The consistency was the hardest part. Cancel maintained a specific, opinionated voice across a large volume of content output. He wasn’t just publishing marketing content; he was articulating a philosophy. The posts had positions. The conference had themes. The book had arguments. Thought leadership that consists of observations without opinions is easy to produce and easy to forget. Thought leadership with a clear point of view creates friction, which creates discussion, which creates memory.
Removing the contact forms from Drift’s own website was both the most risky element and the most valuable. It forced the team to prove the category internally before asking customers to prove it. When prospects visited Drift.com and had a genuinely good experience with the chat, they became converts. The product was the proof. No competitor could replicate that argument without also removing their own forms, which most weren’t prepared to do.
The Results
Drift reached a $1 billion valuation in 2019, three years after its commercial launch. The achievement was notable not just for the speed but for what it represented: a company had created a category from scratch, named it, built a curriculum around it, and scaled to unicorn status faster than most B2B software companies reach meaningful revenue.
Google search volume for “conversational marketing” moved from essentially zero in early 2016 to a widely used industry term within two years. By 2019, analyst firms were publishing reports on the conversational marketing category, enterprise sales teams were building conversational marketing strategies, and Gartner had added related concepts to its technology hype cycle. The category was real — which made Drift’s founding position in it an asset that compounded.
The HYPERGROWTH conference built a community of practitioners who identified with the conversational marketing movement independent of any specific tool. The Conversational Marketing book put the methodology in front of audiences who would encounter it years after its publication date.
The Lesson for Today’s Marketers
Drift’s story is instructive for any B2B startup trying to break through a crowded market where incumbents have more resources, more customers, and more name recognition. The default response to that situation is to compete on features or price. The Drift approach was to compete on worldview: assert that the entire existing category is doing it wrong, name the alternative, and then build the business inside that frame.
This works when three conditions align. The insight has to be real: you need an actual problem that buyers genuinely experience. The timing has to be right: the technology or behavior change that makes your solution viable has to have already happened. And the founder has to be willing to be the public, persistent, opinionated voice of the category for years, not months.
The remove-your-own-forms decision is the element most companies would struggle to replicate. It cost Drift real leads in the short term. Visitors who preferred forms couldn’t use them. Sales velocity probably slowed in the immediate aftermath. But it bought something more valuable than any number of form-captured leads: credibility. You can’t fake living your own philosophy. When you do live it, publicly, in a way that costs you something, buyers notice.
The lesson for today isn’t “start a chat company.” It’s that when you find a genuinely broken process in your buyers’ lives, the highest-leverage move is to name what’s broken clearly enough that everyone recognizes it, and then build your brand around being the company that fixed it.
Key Results
- Category term search growth: Google search volume for 'conversational marketing' grew from near-zero to mainstream within two years
- Valuation growth: Drift reached a $1 billion valuation by 2019, three years after launch
- Playbook downloads: The Conversational Marketing book (co-authored by David Cancel) became a bestseller in its category
- Conference: Drift's HYPERGROWTH conference sold out multiple years running
SWOT Analysis
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Key Takeaway
Drift's most important product decision was also a marketing decision: it deleted its contact forms and required chat instead, forcing the company to live the category it was creating. Authenticity in category creation requires eating your own cooking publicly.
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