In a set of studios close to London’s Old Street roundabout, Stef Lewandowski and his team are working on changing how digital products are built and tested. What sets Mr Lewandowski, co-founder of Makeshift, apart from many of his neighbours in London’s tech community is that his business releases a new product each month, a rate that it achieves by developing multiple ideas simultaneously rather than focusing on one single product.
The company’s latest product – HireMyFriend, an online recruitment platform – was conceived, built and tested within a couple of weeks. Mr Lewandowski, whose partners in the business include Paul Birch, co-founder of social network Bebo, says the intention is to make 12 apps or digital products this year, some of which may scale up to become companies in their own right. “The idea of parallelism is opposite to the received wisdom of people in the start-up scene – they’ll tell you just to focus on one thing, to go for just one idea,” he says.
Traditionally, a new product requires a big investment of time and money. That is changing as the cost of prototyping products becomes lower and lower, which means innovators can test multiple hypotheses at the same time, putting products in front of customers in weeks not months. Companies such as Makeshift are recognising that they can execute several ideas simultaneously, which means they are not only accelerating the rate of innovation, but also trying to maximise their chances of commercial success by hedging their bets. Now bigger organisations are seeking to emulate start-up behaviour so they can become more adept at digital building.