When the Category Becomes Too Small

At some point, being The Beatles was apparently no longer enough.

That sounds absurd because The Beatles were already bigger than almost anything a group of musicians could reasonably become. They had the records, films, money, attention and enough cultural influence to change how millions of people dressed, spoke and understood youth. Yet in 1968 they launched Apple Corps, a company that was supposed to hold records, films, publishing, electronics, fashion, inventions and whatever else interested them. It was called a company, but it seems to have begun more like a container for excess imagination. The band had accumulated more ideas, people, opportunities and impulses than the category of “band” could hold, so Apple Corps offered somewhere to put all of it.

I keep thinking about this because I have spent years trying to explain what HAAM is. Calling it a design studio is easy, but it immediately removes half of what interests me. Calling it a technology company sounds more ambitious, although it creates the expectation that there is one product, one market and perhaps a dashboard where monthly recurring revenue moves upward. An agency suggests client services, a consultancy suggests advice, a venture company suggests investments, a lab suggests experiments and a production company suggests media. HAAM has touched parts of all of these, yet none of them really explains the thing.

The usual advice is to choose. Pick one category, define the customer, clarify the offer, remove everything else and repeat the same sentence until the market understands it. This is probably sensible advice because many companies become confusing when their founders are unwilling to decide what business they are in. Breadth can be an intellectual excuse for weak sales, unfinished products and an inability to commit. I know this because I have produced my own large collection of unfinished things.

There are domains, prototypes, maps, articles, tools, interfaces, databases, proposals, visual systems, public projects, abandoned companies and folders with names that made complete sense at two in the morning. Some projects became real. Some remained screenshots. Some waited until the technology caught up with the original idea, while others probably deserved to disappear. I am therefore suspicious of the romantic version of the multidisciplinary company, because it is attractive to imagine that every scattered interest belongs to a grand hidden system when sometimes scattered interests are simply scattered interests.

Apple Corps is useful because it does not offer a clean success story. The ambition was real, and so was the chaos. The Beatles wanted to create a place where artists could work without being flattened by the conventional music business. Apple Records became meaningful, releasing their own work and supporting other artists, while Apple Films participated in projects that remain part of the culture around the band. Other divisions became expensive experiments. Apple Electronics was placed in the hands of Magic Alex, a charismatic inventor whose promises often exceeded what he could deliver, and the Apple Boutique eventually closed with its remaining clothes given away.

The vision arrived before the operating system. That may be the actual pattern worth paying attention to. Some companies begin with a product and gradually build an identity around it. Others begin with a worldview and spend years discovering what kind of organisation could express it without collapsing. The second type is harder to explain because its coherence is invisible at first. From the outside, it looks like a person doing unrelated things.

The same person might redesign a medical service, repair a hacked website, build a public Wi-Fi database, develop an AI shopping companion, write about obscure infrastructure, advise a cultural organisation and imagine owning a network of diagnostic laboratories. The outputs belong to different industries, but the underlying instinct may still be consistent. In my case, the recurring interest is often the point where something important has become difficult to understand, difficult to trust or difficult to keep working. Sometimes that problem appears in an interface. Sometimes it is buried in a database, an organisational process, a security failure or a public system that everyone depends on but nobody appears responsible for.

The work can be visual, technical, operational or editorial. It may involve code, research, writing, facilitation or simply noticing that several parts managed separately are actually one experience. This is why listing HAAM’s services has always felt slightly wrong. The list keeps growing because the skills are responses to situations rather than the purpose of the company. Information architecture, interaction design, software, security, art direction, infrastructure, research and operations are tools. The more stable thing is the judgment about where to apply them.

The Beatles could have started separate companies for records, clothes, films and electronics. They chose one name because the name represented permission. Apple was where an idea could go before anyone knew exactly what it was. That kind of umbrella can be powerful because new work can inherit context, credibility and resources from previous work. A film can support a record, a technical system can become a public service, a client project can reveal a product opportunity, and research can become writing that attracts the person who helps build the next thing. The projects stop being isolated transactions and begin to form an environment.

The umbrella also hides danger. Almost any decision can be justified as part of the ecosystem. A founder can continue opening doors without closing any, and every new project can feel strategically adjacent when viewed from a sufficient distance. The company gradually becomes a museum of the founder’s curiosity, maintained by increasingly complicated explanations. Apple Corps had The Beatles’ money to burn while learning this. Most of us do not.

The real challenge may be building enough structure that breadth can accumulate instead of dissolving into noise. A multidisciplinary company needs stronger discipline than a narrow company because it must know which projects reinforce the whole, which are paid experiments, which belong to clients, which should become owned products and which are distractions wearing interesting clothes. It needs financial control, clear ownership and the ability to stop. Taste can choose the projects, but taste alone cannot operate them.

I have often treated structure as something that should arrive after the creative work. First make the thing, then organise it. This works until there are too many things, at which point the lack of structure begins deciding what gets finished. The project with the loudest emergency wins, the quiet valuable project waits, knowledge stays in one person’s head and a domain renews for five years without the product behind it moving forward. The organisation already has a system, but it is a system created accidentally by urgency.

AI changes this equation slightly. Many ideas that once required a team, a budget and a long period of coordination can now be tested by one person. Old notes can become prototypes, half-built systems can be repaired and visual directions that would previously have remained moodboards can become working interfaces. The cost of crossing between writing, code, design and research has fallen. This makes the Apple Corps model more available, but it also makes its failure mode more available. It has never been easier to start five divisions before breakfast.

Increased capability can easily become a reason to expand indefinitely. A more useful possibility is that AI allows a small organisation to create coherence across work that would previously have been fragmented between specialists and companies. The value comes from making connections that were previously too expensive to maintain, then choosing a small number of those connections to develop properly. AI can help one person move across disciplines, but it cannot remove the need to decide which responsibilities the organisation is willing to carry.

HAAM may eventually look less like an agency and more like a small operating company for unusual projects. It might work for clients, own products, publish ideas, maintain public infrastructure and participate in ventures that require design and technology to be considered together. Some of those things already exist in primitive form. The question is whether they can be made to support one another rather than compete for attention.

I do not yet know whether that becomes a meaningful institution or an elaborate description of my inability to specialise. Both explanations remain plausible, and that uncertainty may be healthier than forcing a category too early. Categories are useful when they help people understand what they can trust you to do. They become limiting when maintaining the category matters more than following the work. The goal is therefore not endless freedom. It is enough coherence that the company can move without having to reinvent its reason for existing every time.

The Beatles had become too large for the idea of a band, so they tried to build a company around everything that came next. They made mistakes that now look almost comically avoidable, but the impulse itself still feels contemporary. People whose work crosses technology, culture, media and systems often find that the existing containers are too small. Creating a larger container only helps when the organisation is capable of deciding what belongs together.

That is the version of HAAM I am interested in. A place where different kinds of work can live under one name because they share responsibility, judgment and a way of seeing. A company that can move between disciplines while respecting what each discipline requires. A structure that gives unfinished ideas somewhere to grow and remains strict enough to let the wrong ones die.

The category may only become visible after the work has accumulated. Until then, the company has to be coherent before it is easily explainable.

Connected reading

• Why Is AI Making Me Think About Business Strategy?
• The AI Was Easy. Understanding the Company Was Hard.
• The Product Is No Longer the Product
• The Most Important Jobs Don’t Exist Yet
• The Product Needs a Harness

AI authorship note

This essay began with Kris Haamer noticing that The Beatles’ Apple Corps resembled the broad version of HAAM: a company intended to hold work across design, technology, media, products and experiments. AI helped research Apple Corps, test the comparison, identify the danger of using multidisciplinarity as an excuse for weak commitment, and draft the article. Kris shaped the argument around the need for stronger operating discipline, connected it to his own unfinished projects and approved the final publication.