Culture as Strategy, Not HR | Lessons from Building Hire.Inc
How a two-question framework fixed our hiring, product, and growth problems.
At Hire.Inc, we were drowning in what felt like separate crises. Every Monday brought a new fire: a key customer threatening to leave, a new hire who was clearly a bad fit, or another three-hour meeting that ended with no real decision.
The irony was brutal. We built a platform to help companies make better hiring decisions, but we were terrible at hiring, slow at shipping, and losing customers while we debated ourselves into paralysis.
For months, I treated these as isolated bugs in the system. Customer churn?
A product problem. Bad hires? A recruiting problem.
Slow decisions? A process problem.
I was wrong. They were all symptoms of the same disease.
The Moment It Clicked
I remember the exact moment it clicked. We were in another marathon meeting, debating whether to ship a feature that was "80% ready" while our biggest customer was actively evaluating competitors. That's when I realized, we didn't have a decision-making problem.
We had a culture problem. Our "culture" was a collection of nice-sounding values on a slide deck, but when pressure hit, it offered no guidance. It was useless.
Culture as Your Company's Operating System
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Culture isn't your pizza parties or team outings. It's your company's true operating system. It’s the background process that’s constantly running, executing decisions whether you’re paying attention or not.
Most founders treat culture like an app you install later—an HR initiative. We rebuilt ours as core infrastructure, as essential as our codebase.
The Two-Question Framework
We analyzed our best and worst decisions and distilled our entire philosophy into two questions that now filter every choice. They are our culture, codified.
1. "Does this prove we know our customer better than they know themselves?"
This question is our shield against vanity projects and internal opinions. It forces us beyond surface-level feature requests to solve the underlying, often unstated, pain. If the answer isn't a resounding "yes," we don't do it.
2. "Will this work when everything goes sideways?"
This is our filter for quality and resilience. It kills fragile solutions, shortcuts taken under pressure, and desperation hires. It forces us to build things—and a team—that last.
Making It Real
A framework is useless without enforcement. Every Monday, each team member posts a 'Commit Note' in our #weekly-commits Slack channel:"By EOW, I'm shipping [specific outcome] because [customer insight that passes our two-question filter].
"No vague "working on" statements. No commitments that don't align with our OS. Just clear outcomes tied to our core principles.
The Results
Six months later: 300+ sales last month. Hires who perform and amplify our culture. Product decisions that happen in minutes, not meetings.
We didn't just get faster. We got smarter.
Your Turn
Your culture is already making decisions for you. The question is whether you wrote the code for it intentionally.Most founders spend weeks crafting values that sound good. Instead, spend an afternoon defining the 2-3 questions that will guide your team when you're not in the room. That's your real culture.What's the one question that could cut through your team's biggest debates right now?
Building Hire.Inc has taught me that culture isn't what you hang on the walls—it's the tool you use to make hard choices. If you're wrestling with this in your own startup, I'd love to hear what's working for you in the comments.