Creating the CIAM Market Category at Janrain

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventures Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Michael Olson.

Early in my career, I joined Janrain as employee number eight. We were a pre-Series A, pre-revenue startup with a single flagship product: social login. At the time, social login was a novel capability that allowed people to create accounts on websites using existing identities like Facebook or Google instead of creating another username and password. The product solved a real customer problem, but the digital landscape was changing rapidly. Consumers were no longer interacting with brands from a single desktop browser—they were moving between laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other digital touchpoints. Traditional methods of identifying customers, primarily browser cookies, could no longer provide companies with a unified understanding of who their customers were across devices.

While social login was valuable, it wasn't a large enough market to support the scale of company we wanted to build. If we continued positioning ourselves around a single feature, we would limit both our growth potential and the way customers perceived our business. We realized there was a much larger market problem emerging, but customers didn't yet have language to describe it. My responsibility was to help reposition the company around this broader opportunity by defining a market category customers could immediately understand and rally behind. This wasn't simply a messaging refresh. We needed to determine whether the market required a completely new category, develop positioning that reflected the changing needs of digital marketers, create a compelling narrative that explained why existing approaches were no longer sufficient, align the company internally around that story, and influence analysts, customers, and competitors to adopt this new way of thinking—so Janrain would be seen as the company leading the emerging market rather than selling another point solution.