The First Thing We Built At Cuddli

Most startups begin with an idea, a product plan, and two or three excited co-founders. Sometimes there is even a business plan. Rarely, however, does a company start with values as the first item on the roadmap. Our values are the first thing we built at Cuddli. We think this has been really helpful to us along the way as we have developed our product and we would like to share our values with you.

At Cuddli, we think values are really, really important. In fact, we agreed upon our values before we wrote a single line of code. Why did we do this so early? Along with a company's mission, values serve as a guiding light. A well-developed set of values is a useful filter (although not always a quick and easy filter) when it comes to deciding whether or not to do something. A well-developed set of values helps to put business decisions into clearer focus. But it goes deeper than that. Values have also helped us to build our team. Making our values public has helped us attract people to Cuddli who share them. Particularly when a startup is new, we think that attracting people who share our values is actually more important than attracting people with a specific skill set. After all, in a startup, the skill sets needed can change rapidly and we could even pivot to an entirely different product. If our first product fails, all that might be left is a few bucks in our bank account and the people on our team.

When we developed our values, the founding team got together on Skype (one of our founders lives in Europe so this is how we meet) and had a brainstorming session about what makes a company a great place to work. After all, it was our company, so why not make it the best, most awesome place we've ever worked? Nothing was out of bounds, so we wrote everything down. We also thought about what we didn't like about the jobs we had previously held, and wrote these down. And finally, we wrote down our most important personal values, and the most important attributes in team members. It was a fairly simple exercise afterwards to organize these together. In fact, it was pretty awesome to see this come together because there was no individual area that had only been called out by a single person. Most of the time, regardless of whether it was a desired attribute or a pet peeve, at least two of us had called out each item and when the exercise was completed, we ranked the items in order.

From here, we developed our values. These actually came very quickly because they practically leaped from the page when we reviewed the results of our brainstorming. And so, after close to a year of living them, we'd like to share our values with you along with a few words on why they're important to us:

Everything we do starts and ends with people. We think that too many companies lose the human element, so this is our first value. Cuddli is not a soulless corporate machine. It's made up of people, and we make awesome stuff for other people. So, we pay careful attention to things we do that affect people. Conversely, we know that if we make people around us happy, it will be good for our business.

We always consider our users first. We'll have multiple constituencies to satisfy as a company--users, customers, governments, partners and investors. When we make decisions, our users are (and always will be) the most important decision factor--even under pressure, and even if it's a difficult decision. It takes years to earn the support and trust of users and about 5 minutes to lose it, so we'll always be on their side. It's not only good business, it's the right thing to do.

We solve problems, not create them. Everyone has, at one point, been in a situation where someone is trying to create problems in an effort to keep things from moving forward. And we've all had someone in our lives who is entirely well-meaning, but whose life is a constant whirlwind of drama. Folks like this aren't a good fit for Cuddli. We look for and hire problem-solvers, and we remind ourselves that opportunities are often hiding inside problems.

We communicate openly and honestly. As a distributed team, we need to be exceptionally open with our communication. Even more importantly, we need to trust one another to be honest, even when there is bad news. None of this is to say that we aren't respectful in our tone of communication. We're nice people, and we are nice to each other!

We are humble and self-critical. We ask ourselves two questions when we are working: "Am I proud of this?" and "Is this my best work?" If it's not, we do what it takes to be the best. But we have to combine being self-critical with humility. We can't be so proud of our work that we ignore feedback. When faced with new information, we need to have the humility to change course. This value helped us to recover from a disastrous decision in our product design.

We deliver on our promises. This value isn't here to punish anyone for making a mistake or blowing a deadline. We're all human. It's to remind ourselves that if we are living the rest of our values, we should be consistently delivering. So, if we fail to deliver, we need to understand why.

Do you share our values? Cuddli is now hiring an iOS developer at our office in Zagreb, Croatia. Join us and you'll have the chance to work with an incredible team on one of the most exciting products you've ever seen. Meet us @CuddliApp!