About — made by multitudes

What do you do when you have too many ideas and too many things you want to do?

You should stay in your lane. Find a niche and stick with it. When you try to be everything to everyone, you’re nothing to no one. You need to focus. Doing too many different things will pull you away from your priorities.

That’s solid business advice. It makes sense. It’s also boring. My brain is curious. It wants to learn about everything. I feel most creative and useful when working on a few very different projects at once. I’ve had a non-traditional career path which has left me with different, yet complementary, skills. I don’t want to do one thing — and honestly, I think I’m at my best when doing many different things.

So how do you take that solid business advice and combine it with a personality that fights against it?

You make Made by Multitudes.

Made by Multitudes is a business that creates businesses. You could call us an innovation lab, a product design studio, or a holding company. None of those quite fit. It’s more like an experiment. The hypothesis is — you can build multiple brands with complementary services in different niches, with different buyers, and run them at the same time.

Every day we’re testing that.

We’re a neo-generalist business operating specialist brands. Not a collection of disparate companies under one umbrella. Every employee works for Made by Multitudes. They may have their strengths and specific domain knowledge that fits with one brand more than the others, but they are part of one team. A team that makes each other better through diversification, collaboration and communication.

Our working principles

If it’s a business, it needs to make money.

Money is the lifeblood of a business. We’re bootstrapped, so that means we need profit. There is no point in being in business if we’re not profitable. Take reasonable steps to grow revenue and keep costs low.

Not everything needs to make money.

Profit is important but we are not profit over everything. We need money to survive, but we do not need to wring every dollar out of an idea. In fact, we should do many things for fun or because they will be useful. Whatever these things are, they are not businesses. Never confuse the two.

We embrace contradiction, complexity and uncertainty

We pay attention and adapt when needed. We’re grounded in reality and innovate based on how things are and where they are going. Do not be rigid. Be nimble and self-aware.

If it doesn’t help the whole, the part needs to go.

What we make is connected to everything else. Whether it’s generating leads, developing skills, bringing extra value to clients, or some other benefit, what we create makes everything else better. We are one company before we are many. Avoid unhelpful distractions.

Be competent and committed.

We do not start a business that we can’t run. We do not build a product we can’t maintain. A decision to make something is a promise to see it through, and we only make promises we can keep.

What's in a name?

We do not work alone. No one does. It's all made by multitudes. Our work is the result of our influences, our collaborators, our clients and everyone who has come before us.

"Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

We’re embracing that largeness, that richness, that complexity. We’re embracing the fact that we are not one thing, and that we are made by many things. We’re embracing the fact that we have many different interests, and that we can use those to make many different things. As individuals and as a collective.

In business, and society in general, we are incentivised to box ourselves in and be just one thing. We operate outside of those boxes by making many different boxes — the brands, the products, the services — and running them at the same time. We can be many things to many people through thoughful positioning and strategy.

Who? What? Why?