What would your business be able to accomplish if the only thing you had to handle was the problem you were best at solving? If HR, payroll, customer service, shipping, and databases were already set up and waiting for you, and the only thing you had to focus on was your product?

A “lattice” is a single corporation comprised of smaller, atomic businesses each focused on a single purpose, selling their services to one another. It’s a microeconomy, where when someone creates a tool or solves a business problem, they can build it in a way that can be shared. Rather than rebuilding and reinventing the wheel for each company, the problem of “X” can be solved once, and then utilized by anyone with that same problem. Named after a lattice in chemistry, it’s strength is not in the atomic units, it’s in the nature, and number of their bonds. This isn’t a new idea, it’s inspired by farmer co-ops and incubators, but it’s different in that it’s using technology built and opensourced by megacorporations for the intention of infinite growth, and repurposed and reversed to manage sustainable growth.

But let me explain how we got here.

The current state of business

In order to build, sell, or distribute any good, you have to tackle several disparate problems with varying levels of success. You need to manage customer login and personal information, you need automated and one-off emails sent, host your website, market your product, manage finances, and then, if you’re fortunate, actually solve the problem for your customers.

To simplify things, vendors have packaged solutions conveniently for a fee. Salesforce will manage your customers, Quickbooks will manage your finances, SendGrid will manage your emails, and Squarespace will host your website, and Zapier will glue it all together.

Still, you’re left managing all of these separate expenses and features, and while these vendors are helpful, they are not your friends. They’ll try to lock you in, upsell you, and your only value to them is the subscription you pay for their services. These companies aren’t bad, it’s just their incentives aren’t aligned with yours. It’s a dog-eat-dog economy, or “hostile capitalism”. What I’m working towards is “hosted capitalism”.

In a lattice, one company builds an email service. It’s a watertight, perfected, simplified interface, with retries, send confirmations, and more, and everyone just uses their service. Any update or improvement I add to the service is immediately felt by everyone using it. I proxy the requests to vendors like SendGrid or Amazon Email Service, and charge a small fee just for maintenance, but ultimately you’re paying for the cost of sending an email, without needing to build it yourself. If you need privacy, then the service is cloned and you use your own API key, but the service is still managed by that one, atomic email company. Rather than selling you the email service for profit as a vendor would, it’s about splitting the bill. Like roommates sharing an internet bill, you’re using the monthly credits that would otherwise go unspent, and lowering everyone’s costs in the process. I did just that, and you can use my email service right now.

re:mart, the first lattice

I have a company called “re:mart”, and it’s the first, experimental lattice. We’ll get to what it actually does for profit, but first and foremost, it needs to be able to email customers. Email is essential for automated messages saying their order was processed, or one-off emails for customer service, and since I needed to build an email service for these purposes, I built it in a way that is infinitely scalable, and easily sharable. Not only that, but the more emails we collectively send, we can get a bulk discount by moving to a higher product tier. In short, the cost of me sending emails goes down the more I’m able to share it.

To use my email service, you register a domain (which takes 3 minutes), and you’re off to the races. I’ll bill you for the emails you send, and that’s it. Don’t send any emails one month? Then you don’t need to pay a penny for that month.