This year Lobby turned 8.
It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. It’s incredible that a casual conversation over coffee about how we could do something more fulfilling with our lives has turned into a nearly decade-long project. One that has provided us with incredible experiences, a semi-stable income and connections to remarkable and inspiring people. Increasingly, this job has given us something new and exciting. A sense of place and purpose.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Lobby has been dark for so long that I think it’s time for us to reintroduce ourselves, explain why we’re still here and what our intentions are for the future.
Lobby is a small company. It consists of myself, Liam, and my good friend and co-founder Alex.
One summer we were reconnecting over a coffee and discovered quickly that we were experiencing many of the same frustrations.
Alex was sick of selling high-end furniture I was sick of odd carpentry jobs and planting trees, both of us had degrees in fine art that were collecting dust. We needed a change.
Our first couple of ideation sessions were over-caffeinated brain dumps that filled notebooks with business ideas but accomplished little in terms of getting us closer to our goal, but those first drafts of what lobby could have been, still make me proud. Not because they were good ideas, they really weren’t, but because they were based on a desire to help people and build community.
These ideas never crystallized into anything tangible but they did keep me up at night. These ideas represented potential and they gave me a sense of hope and purpose. They lit a fire.
Our first logo…
Once started, that fire we lit
took us for a ride.
We’ve learned almost every possibly creative skill out there, from package design to web design, documentary video to product photography. We took every piece of practical business advice on how to make an efficient, profitable business and threw it in the garbage. We’ve taken pay cut after pay cut for the right and wrong reasons.
We've gone down asinine rabbit holes that took us nowhere and became so desperate to understand ourselves we nearly paid a branding guru 13k euros to help us brand our own business. And we’ve stubbornly (and perhaps stupidly) bootstrapped the whole thing ourselves self-teaching and self-learning the entire way. It has been a glorious, painful, hilarious and frustrating experience. I would be lying if I said we’ve loved every minute of it. But we’ve loved most of them.
I’m not writing this because I think anyone will be particularly interested in our origin story, or to trace a line from humble origins to the dizzying heights of our current day, multi-million dollar unicorn agency (ha).
Quite the contrary. I’m writing this because we are and intend to remain small and humble.
And because we believe that growth, change and struggle don't define us as weak. They are strengths. So if this story sounds familiar. If you’re the person who knows where you want to be but doesn't know how to get there. If you’ve been working two jobs so you can launch your dream. If you’re committed to making people's lives better. Then we’re writing this for you too.
