Proof

Two categories their markets adopted

You can check the second one on your phone in ninety seconds.

The claim

I name the category a company owns, then build the machinery that makes its market repeat the name. Two of those categories are in use today. Continuous Brokerage in insurance and Cloud Convergence in enterprise IT. Ask Perplexity who coined the term Continuous Brokerage and it credits Alex Paras of Lakeside Consulting Group by name, drawing on 24 sources. Three published books. Four conferences built from nothing. Around twenty companies over fifteen years.

15Years doing this
3Books published
4Conferences built from zero
2Categories the market adopted

Can you check this yourself in ninety seconds?

Yes, and I'd rather you did. Open Perplexity and type this exactly:

who coined the term Continuous Brokerage

It answers that the evidence points to Alex Paras, founder of Lakeside Consulting Group, and it pulls from 24 sources to say so. Continuous Brokerage is a category the Viral Genius Institute designed for Lakeside. It lives on a one-page site with no search optimization behind it at all, and the engines cite that page for the definition.

What Perplexity returns for Continuous Brokerage (measured August 2026)
"who coined the term Continuous Brokerage" Names Alex Paras. 24 sources. "Continuous Brokerage" + the company name Quotes the one-page site's own definition. 10 sources.

Two things are worth sitting with. That one-page site has no search optimization behind it, and the same company owns a full corporate site that is properly built and properly optimized. The engines quote the one-pager. The difference was the idea, not the mechanics. One page had something to say.

Who has vouched for this work?

The Startup Book, published in 2024, carries two forewords. Christopher Lochhead, co-author of Play Bigger and The 22 Laws of Category Design, and Joe Pulizzi, who created the content marketing category and founded the Content Marketing Institute.

The same book carries interviews with Lochhead, Pulizzi, Bryan Eisenberg, and Ann Handley. Eisenberg's line from that interview is the one I've built most of my current thinking on: they who control the vocabulary, control the industry. He said it about market perception. It now describes what a machine retrieves.

What does the work actually consist of?

Three things, and the Viral Genius Institute does them in this order every time: excavate the idea the founder already has, name the category around it, then build the machinery that makes the market repeat it.

Categories designed

Continuous Brokerage, for Lakeside Consulting, an insurance consultancy facing a workforce cliff. The category, the book, and the market's own word for the problem. Perplexity credits the term to founder Alex Paras. The Continuous Brokerage Summit runs September 24–25.

Cloud Convergence, for Verge Technologies, a database-infrastructure company. The category came out of thirteen recorded interviews with the founder and nothing else. It is the language the company uses on its own homepage today, which takes about ten seconds to check. The Cloud Convergence Summit runs October 8–9.

Books written and shipped

Three under my own name, and three more that carry a client's name instead, including a manuscript taken from nothing to a print-ready Amazon listing with a release date.

The three books, and what's in each one →

Conferences built from nothing

Four in three years. AI Smart in 2024, co-organized with Canacintra, Mexico's national manufacturing chamber. Founder-Led in 2025. The Strike Marketing Summit in December 2025. And the YOU × AI Summit in 2026, with nineteen speakers and a paid title sponsor.

The rest of it, counted

Fifteen years and around twenty companies, by what was produced.

WhatHow much
Categories named and adopted by their markets2
Books published under my own name3
Category books ghost-written for clients3, one taken to a print-ready Amazon listing
Conferences built from zero4, across 3 years
Founder interviews recorded and turned into content13 for one company alone, dozens more elsewhere
Companies worked with~20, over 15 years

Can I see one of these in full?

Yes. The Viral Genius Institute publishes each engagement it has clearance to publish, start to finish.

Continuous Brokerage →
How a category came out of a founder's childhood, what got built on it, and what the engines say about it now.

Does this work when I'm not in the room?

That's the fairer test, and there's a case I can point at. A founder I know in real-estate services was prolific on YouTube, Facebook and a newsletter for years before we ever spoke. High-value clients now find him by asking ChatGPT.

He was doing it before I met him, and that's exactly why it's worth showing you. It's a natural experiment in the mechanism the Viral Genius Institute argues for. A founder with a distinct, repeated point of view becomes the thing an engine reaches for, and it happens whether or not a consultant is in the room.

Where do you start?

I'll show you my thinking on your business before you pay me anything.

The fastest version is the free Profile. Twelve questions, about fifteen minutes, spoken out loud. You'll get back a plan that names your genius and drafts your category in your own words.

Start talking — free, 12 questions, ~15 min

No account needed to start. Or go straight to the Excavation Method if you already know what you want.

Know a founder sitting on a gold mine he isn't exploiting?

Send him this page. Every client the Viral Genius Institute has ever had arrived because somebody standing next to the founder saw it before the founder did. That person has been a friend, a small investor, a spouse, and twice the same man two years apart.

If you're reading this and thinking of someone specific, you're that person.

Written by Fernando Labastida, founder of the Viral Genius Institute and creator of the Viral Genius Framework.