How to Write the Best Company Description
A company page is like a painting someone sees at an exhibition and decides if they want to buy it or not. Do they want to hang your name on the wall or not? The buyer, in this case, can either be a potential customer or your next hire. Now think of what you, as a business owner, would put on a white canvas that will describe you best? Is it your values? Your last month's financial stats?
The canvas you’re painting is how people will perceive you. If you fail at describing clearly and concisely what’s important, you might not attract high-quality customers or people to your team. It’s not the end of the world. You can always adjust, paint on top of it, refine it, add more color here and there.
You see, shaping a company’s culture and values takes time, just like making a masterpiece. You won’t get everything in place, all the processes, benefits, products on day one. It might take 10 years to get to a point where people will recognize your name or logo on the internet. But what you can do is keep improving. That’s what we’re doing with our service and the main reason we put companies first by offering a dedicated page for this. It’s the blank canvas you can paint however you desire.
From our experience of looking at hundreds of companies, there are a few that always stand out, and we want to share with you why that is and learn from them how to present your company better.
Basecamp
They’ve been in the SaaS industry for over two decades. As a remote company, their work culture wasn’t perfect from the start, but they knew they had to improve as they grew. Get better at their onboarding process, interview people, build rapport with their peers, etc.
In an industry where an employee spends on average 2.5 years and then leaves for another opportunity, you must actively listen and be intentional about building an amazing work environment where people can foster and be happy.
One of Basecamp’s core strengths is making small iterations that have a big impact. They got so good at it that most of the features they develop only need a team of two—one programmer and one designer—and they release them to the public once they feel it reached a “good enough” state. They did the same with their employee handbook. It was released publicly in 2017, but they never stopped to adjust, rewrite, and adapt as time went by.
Right now, Basecamp has around 60 people fully-distributed across the globe. If you're a solo entrepreneur preparing to make your first hires, it’s pretty obvious you shouldn’t waste months on writing a handbook like theirs. But they’re a great role-model to envision where you can take things once you’ve been in an industry for as long as they are.
In an industry where an employee spends on average 2.5 years and then leaves for another opportunity, you must actively listen and be intentional about building an amazing work environment where people can foster and be happy.
One of Basecamp’s core strengths is making small iterations that have a big impact. They got so good at it that most of the features they develop only need a team of two—one programmer and one designer—and they release them to the public once they feel it reached a “good enough” state. They did the same with their employee handbook. It was released publicly in 2017, but they never stopped to adjust, rewrite, and adapt as time went by.
Right now, Basecamp has around 60 people fully-distributed across the globe. If you're a solo entrepreneur preparing to make your first hires, it’s pretty obvious you shouldn’t waste months on writing a handbook like theirs. But they’re a great role-model to envision where you can take things once you’ve been in an industry for as long as they are.
Gumroad
As a smaller remote company (~25 people), celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, the CEO, Sahil Lavingia, took the work culture in a different direction. In Jan 2021, he published an essay on how they work entitled No Meetings, No Deadline, No Full-Time Employees.
In a century where everyone is pushing people to work harder, Sahil shifts 180° by not enforcing deadlines, hiring only part/quarter–time, relying heavily on asynchronous communication. The transparency around the company’s journey is what made it so famous during the past few years. Starting April 2018, each month, Gumroad’s financials were shared publicly. This was a way to re-engage with the community and help other business owners. In Sahil's own words:
In a century where everyone is pushing people to work harder, Sahil shifts 180° by not enforcing deadlines, hiring only part/quarter–time, relying heavily on asynchronous communication. The transparency around the company’s journey is what made it so famous during the past few years. Starting April 2018, each month, Gumroad’s financials were shared publicly. This was a way to re-engage with the community and help other business owners. In Sahil's own words:
As a way to re-engage with the community, I thought about sharing our financials publicly. Founders starting their own companies could learn from our mistakes, utilizing our data to make better decisions.
It was scary: What if we don’t grow every month? It could scare off prospective customers. It’s something I would never expect a startup seeking venture capital to do. It makes sense to hold those cards as close to your chest for as long as possible when you must raise money, hire people, and compete for customers with other venture-seeking startups.
But, since we were not any of those things anymore, it was easier to share that information. We were profitable, and a no-growth month won’t change that. So in April 2018, I started to release our monthly financials publicly.
The company has a public Notion Wiki where you can see their finances, the roadmap, and how they work. Out of all those resources, the most priceless is What’s not so good at Gumroad. From all the companies we’ve seen, not many have the guts to be this transparent.
When you’re focused on attracting high–quality candidates, you want to present only the shinny things—benefits, perks, annual retreat—, but the truth is, being blunt about the stuff that’s not so good within your company is what will make you more trustful, and have amazing people want to work alongside you.
Gumroad had its ups and downs and has been in the industry for the past decade. They’ve learned most lessons the hard way. If you’re a newly founded company and want to hire great people, you don’t have to go the same route as these companies did. Learn from them and apply the learnings to your own business.
Describe your processes briefly (interviewing, on-boarding), how you work, what are some features/problems you solved recently, and display salaries on your job listings upfront. Transparency always wins. The more stuff you’ll hide, the more people will not want to work for you.
In the beginning, I mentioned that your company is like a painting. Basecamp and Gumroad have never stopped refining their masterpiece. You have to start somewhere too. How do you want to paint yours?
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