Britt Gage
@brittfgage
Founder, of All Trades. Building a new type of company for generalists and the founders we seek to serve.
Britt Gage
@brittfgage
Founder, of All Trades. Building a new type of company for generalists and the founders we seek to serve.

It’s hard to get a company to do a new thing, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to change. Companies that are trying to change tend to require an equal and opposite force to overcome the inertia. Large enterprise sales teams are built around signing a single customer, while on the small business end of the market all you need is a few quick calls around an otherwise self-serve solution. When an executive wants their company to change, they often hire expensive, high-status consultants like McKinsey to make a plan that gets everyone on board.
If organizational inertia is one form of resistance that you might want to overcome, what are the business equivalents of simple machines that create mechanical advantage and multiply your input force into a much larger output force? And if they exist, do they have an equivalent trade-off of physical machines where you have to apply the force over a longer distance to gain leverage?
Maybe! Startups often hyper-focus on a small number of customers that share specific traits. This compresses all of the startup’s energy and force into a small space. It’s the opposite of being “spread thin.” The advantage of this approach is that you’re more likely to solve a problem, overcome inertia, and gain adoption by the customers you focus on. The trade-off is that it might be questionable how many more customers you’ll be able to find. I call this a market wedge, where you sacrifice scale for power.
On building of All Trades and Startup Advice
How startups changed since 2020:
-Consumer fell out of love with technology
-Business & Venture OverIndexed on AI
-Money went from Tight to Scared
What’s happening now:
-self founded, funded & reliant
-Profitable out of the gate
-solving problems and building with slower burn rate
-Innovating strategically alongside technical innovation
How do generalists help? Taking a broad approach gets you further faster