The Macrometa Method: Building a Category Without Trying to Create One

Most category creation stories start with a grand vision. Macrometa’s began with a question: “What comes after cloud?” In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Chetan Venkatesh revealed how this simple query led to the emergence of an entirely new market category – without explicitly trying to create one.

Starting with the Right Question In 2013, while others were still adapting to cloud computing, Macrometa’s founders were looking ahead. “When you’re sitting in 2013 and 2014 and you’re trying to think about what the world looks like in 2023… you tend to think it’s more of the same,” Chetan explains. “And I’ve been wrong every time I’ve sort of linearly projected that it’s more of the same.”

Finding the Gap Instead of trying to create a category, they focused on identifying what the cloud couldn’t do. “Because of the way the cloud is technically architected in these giant data centers in remote regions around the world… things get really slow,” Chetan notes. This fundamental limitation became their entry point.

Starting Small Rather than announcing a new category, Macrometa began by solving specific customer problems. “We started with boring problems,” Chetan recalls. The focus was on practical challenges like e-commerce search latency and data accessibility. Only as customers began adopting their platform for increasingly complex problems did they realize they were creating something entirely new.

The Organic Evolution The emergence of their category – what they now call the Global Data Network – happened naturally. “I love to say yes, but I wish I was that smart,” Chetan admits when asked if they planned to create a new category from the start. “It’s more organic, I think, as we were just fascinated by the idea that a network like ours could potentially solve some immediate use cases that customers had.”

Proving the Concept Success came through solving real problems rather than marketing a category. As Chetan explains, “We’ve got customers who are frankly building something that’s as big as YouTube right now on top of our platform, and it’s going to serve 100 million plus users worldwide. There are very few companies that can actually deliver a platform at that scale.”

The Anti-Category Creation Playbook Macrometa’s approach offers several key lessons for founders:

1. Start with Problems, Not Categories “Almost all of them sound accidental,” Chetan notes about successful category creators. “And if by chance founders or people have said I’m going to go create that category, they’ve probably failed when trying to do that.”
2. Focus on Customer Success Rather than marketing a category, Macrometa focused on “enabling customer success and customers to be successful and advocate for us.”
3. Let the Market Tell You The category emerged from customer adoption patterns. As Chetan explains, “As we built out and customers started to adopt our platform for solving some pretty unique problems, that’s when we realized that there might be an opportunity to build a category in and of itself.”

The Results This organic approach has led to remarkable growth. From “zero to 60 plus paying customers in 18-20 months,” including major enterprises like “the third biggest Internet service provider in the US” and “the largest wireless network, Verizon.”

For founders looking to create new categories, Macrometa’s journey offers a compelling alternative to the traditional approach. Instead of starting with category creation in mind, focus on solving fundamental problems in ways that weren’t possible before. Let your category emerge from the unique value you create, rather than trying to force it into existence through marketing.

As Chetan’s experience shows, sometimes the most effective way to create a category is to not try to create one at all. Focus instead on solving real problems in unprecedented ways, and let the category emerge organically from your success.