Who? What? Why?
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 means they work 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
- 01
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, and we should take every step to be as profitable as possible.
- 02
Not everything needs to make money.
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. We should never confuse the two. Every new idea we tackle must be tested with the question — is this a business or a side-project? — and that answer must be respected.
- 03
We embrace contradiction, complexity and uncertainty
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 must make everything else better. We are one company before we are many.
- 04
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 must make everything else better. We are one company before we are many.
- 05
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. If we decide to build, we’ve decided to maintain. Before we start to build, we make sure we have the knowledge and skills to do it. That does not mean that we do not adapt, stretch ourselves or grow.
What's in a name?
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 means they work 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.