Defining What We Actually Stand For

In 2020, we had about twenty people at Mailbutler. On paper, we'd done everything right: proper structure, defined responsibilities, clear processes. Tobias and I had spent real effort getting the organization into shape.

But something was off. The team wasn't sure what we actually wanted. Not the day-to-day tasks — those were clear enough — but the deeper questions. What mattered to us. How to prioritize when two good things competed for the same resources. How we expected the team to weigh trade-offs when there was no obvious right answer.

It took our project manager at the time, Noortje, to name the problem. She was trying to build a plan and kept hitting the same wall: there was no Vision, no Mission, and no Core Values to plan against. Every roadmap decision was a judgment call made from scratch, because there was nothing to check it against.

She was right, and it bothered me more than I expected.

Research before the room

Before Tobias and I sat down to fix this, I spent time researching what Vision, Mission, and especially Core Values are actually for. Not the templated versions you find in a hundred "how to write your company values" articles — the real function they're supposed to serve.

What became clear was this: a set of values isn't a description of who you currently are. It's not the least common denominator you pick because it's inclusive enough that nobody objects. If everyone can nod along to it, it's probably not saying anything.

It must come from us, the founders, unfiltered. No thought given to how it sounds to prospects, investors, or customers. It has to reflect what we actually expect — not what's safe to put on a slide.

That distinction mattered a lot to me going in, because it's the difference between values that guide real decisions and values that just decorate a careers page.

The uncomfortable part

I was upfront with Tobias about what this meant before we even started: if we defined our Vision, Mission, and especially our Core Values honestly, some of our current colleagues might realize they weren't in the right place anymore. Not because they were doing bad work. Because the company's actual spirit — once we named it out loud — might not be their spirit.

That wasn't a risk to manage around. It was the point.

A values statement that describes your culture and simultaneously excludes no one isn't defining anything. It has to say what you are — and by doing that, it has to say what you are not.

If nobody ever feels like they don't fit, you haven't actually written values. You've written a mission-statement-shaped absence of one.

Post-its, locked doors, disagreement

The process itself was simple, even if the conversations weren't always easy. I asked Tobias to work out his own version of Vision, Mission, and Core Values independently — no comparing notes first. I did the same. Then we locked ourselves in a room for a few hours with a pile of post-its and worked through everything we'd each come up with.

We ended up with dozens of notes. We clustered them, argued about which ones actually belonged together, and — this is the part I want to be honest about — we didn't agree on everything. Tobias and I had different expectations of the company in some fundamental ways, and that surfaced clearly in the room.

That was fine. We'd already known we were different people running the same company. The point of the exercise wasn't to force alignment where none existed. It was to find out clearly where it did.

Vision and Mission came together relatively easily. Core Values took much longer — but we landed on a set we both genuinely stood behind:

Focus! Deliver results in an uncertain world. Grow beyond your limits. Celebrate success. See through the customers' eyes. Think and act like owners.

Alongside a Vision — "Business email communication loved again" — and a Mission built around putting people back in the driver's seat of their own inbox, without ever having to leave it.

Where we landed, six years later

Company values shouldn't be static any more than the company itself is. We've changed. We've grown. I've matured, and so has how I think about what Mailbutler is for.

Today, the Core Values read differently:

Grow beyond your limits. Celebrate success. Think critically, evolve ideas. Embrace change and adapt to thrive. Customers determine our success.

Some carried straight through — grow beyond your limits and celebrate success meant the same thing in 2020 and mean the same thing now. Others evolved: see through the customers' eyes became something closer to customers determine our success — a shift from empathy toward accountability. And focus gave way to think critically, evolve ideas — less about narrowing attention, more about staying intellectually honest as the product and the market shift under us.

The Vision tightened too, from "Business email communication loved again" to simply "Email, effortless." Fewer words, but I'd argue it says more, because by 2020 we already knew exactly what we were trying to remove from people's day.

Why this still matters

None of this works as a one-time exercise. The value of writing your Core Values down isn't the document — it's the discipline of checking every hard call against it later. Whether to ship a feature. Whether to take on an investor. Whether to keep someone on the team whose expectations have quietly drifted from the company's.

If your values never make anyone uncomfortable, they're not values. They're marketing.

That's the test I still apply today, years after that room full of post-its.