Fostering the right company cult

Fostering the right company culture is critical to scaling your startup.

So as soon as funding is in place, you can start scaling up – right?

Not quite. Instead, make strategic use of that beginning phase when you have a small, loyal – even fanatical – group of users. Find your early superfans and hypercritics, and take time to learn from their passionate feedback. Figure out what your guardrails are, what you’ll tolerate, and who to schmooze – including industry bigwigs and government agencies. Once you scale up, it will be tough to dig this deep or change course.

Honest, detailed feedback can guide you to the essence of who you really are as a business. And being in touch with that core will help you with your next task: developing your company culture.

Netflix employees seem to have an enviable gig. They have no set working hours or vacation policy; Netflix assumes that the kind of people they hire don’t need nine-to-five restrictions. Vacations are encouraged with the view that creative thinkers will come back even more inspired. The company makes it clear that they’re a team – albeit a competitive, driven one.

Clearly, this mentality is working for the streaming giant, but that’s no accident. The environment and its creative payoffs are a result of a very deliberate process of creating culture – more than 100 slides worth. Netflix’s Culture Deck is accessible to anyone on the internet; take a look for yourself!

Developing this clarity at the very beginning is crucial. Once a culture has established itself, it’s difficult to undo or change. Figure out what your core values are as well as how you’ll treat your employees and customers. Write a manifesto if you need to. Then, hire people who buy into the culture you’ve envisioned, because it will have a ripple effect: when you hire one person, you also get their network.

This doesn’t mean you should hire a homogenous group, though – it’s important to commit to meaningful diversity. Just as a diverse set of people can appreciate the same set of core values, so can your early investors. So choose investors the same way you’d consider cofounders! That’s how much of an impact they’ll have.

When done right, culture can synergize the environment of a growing startup. It can raise morale and feed back into a loop where employees work even harder – which in turn causes the business to do better and attract more customers.