You can build a good product once. But can you do it again?

(This blog expands on themes from our podcast series with Mint, The Long Game Dialogues. Read on to know more.)

Brands have more tools than ever at their disposal today—early user feedback, low-code tools, Reddit forums, AI, and so much more—which means building a good product is easier than it used to be.

But things don't end with your first launch. In fact, that's where the real work begins.

Sustaining success in business actually lies in consistently showing up for your customers. It's in listening to their feedback, going back to the drawing board to make improvements, reiterating, launching, marketing it better, and repeating the whole cycle again with the same level of dedication and excellence each time.

But to do this, you need more than just talent. You need a reliable system that makes this kind of excellence sustainable. And that system is culture.

Sure, you can credit a great product to brilliant engineers—and that's not wrong. But what keeps this talent motivated over time? What drives them to keep pushing boundaries? It's the culture they work in: a culture that rewards curiosity, celebrates iteration, and supports bold thinking.

Culture is what makes excellence repeatable. It's the quiet force that turns one-off wins into long-term success.

Culture—the missing puzzle piece

Most startups today channel their energy into building the perfect product, nailing their marketing, and chasing VCs. While these things can bring success, they're not guaranteed to keep you in the game long-term. What truly sustains a company and keeps them going in the long run is its culture. And not just that—it can also be a powerful differentiator that helps customers understand what it is that you stand for. When your values resonate with theirs, you not only have a loyal customer that buys from you but also someone that champions your brand.

Founders need to realize that culture begins to take shape in an organization no matter what. You're better off tackling big questions about what culture should look like from the outset, because if you don't, it will often shape itself in ways you don't intend it to.

It's understandable why culture-building takes a backseat with many business leaders—you don't reap the benefits of it right away. You don't see instant wins like with a product launch or funding round.

But unchecked culture does have a way of catching up with you. You'll only begin noticing it when teams don't work together the way they should, or they fail to see the big picture, or when you see the morale of your people taking a hit, and they begin to leave. By then, it's usually too late, though. In short, the best time to build a healthy org culture is before it becomes a problem.

But what even is culture, and how do I begin to build it?

Given that culture is intangible, it's normal to wonder how to go about shaping it; things are easier when you have a list of actionable things, after all. The easiest thing to do is to look inwards and answer a few questions:

• What do we always do, even when no one is watching?

• What kind of behavior do we consistently reward?

• What's frowned upon here, even when it's not said aloud?

• What behavior would never be tolerated, regardless of who's involved?

The answers here can be telling about what ethics and framework you operate on, even if nothing is formalized. Once you get a sense of what you stand for, the next step is to make sure those values show up as interactions and lived experiences for the people involved.

For example, at Zoho, one of the strongest signals of our culture is that no colleague is ever addressed as "sir" or "ma'am". Everybody goes by their first name, regardless of their designation. By doing this, we hope to create a culture where hierarchies take a back seat and mutual respect is prioritized.

Another example is how our campus is completely devoid of manager cabins. Our workspace is designed in such a way that anybody can walk up to anyone, with no door to knock on. And that's not just a choice we've made architecturally—it's a cultural one.

It's also not uncommon for companies to confuse perks with culture. A ping-pong table, snack bar, and a few cool gadgets might all be fun, but they're surface level. And what's the point when people don't want to stick around?

Have you created a culture where people speak up, even when their opinions go against the grain? Does your system operate in a way that rewards effort? Or do you only reward outcomes? The answers to these questions are powerful markers of the kind of culture that's taking shape in your organization.

The price you pay when you don't invest in culture

It might be tempting for companies to continue to make easy decisions at the cost of culture, especially when it seems to get them results. Choices like normalizing overwork, avoiding difficult conversations, or brushing off feedback from employees might feel harmless in the short term. But over time, they do cost you.

This phenomenon is also referred to as culture debt. You accumulate it as you prioritize growth over building a healthy org culture. Like tech debt, it doesn't show up right away. It keeps compounding quietly; and when the symptoms finally surface, they're very expensive to fix.

You'll see it in rising attrition, low morale, burnout, poor communication, and toxic behavior—basically, everything that's detrimental to the health of a company. By the time you're forced to confront it, you'll realize that it's going to cost you far more than what it would have initially taken to invest in culture.

Play the long game

The thing with culture is that it's non-static—it keeps evolving. What worked when you had 60 employees might not serve you when you have 6,000, and that's okay. But what's important is to ensure that you start early so you can lay the foundation for how your culture evolves without losing its core.

Here's Rajendran Dandapani, our director of engineering, explaining how we've managed to preserve the core of our culture even as the company has continued to evolve for nearly 30 years.

Good culture, when nurtured properly, will help you attract the right talent—talent that will have the confidence to experiment, take risks, and grow with the company. When that happens, you end up building something that will ultimately outlive you. It will have roots that are deep enough to carry forward your vision long after you've stepped away. And that's how lasting legacies are made—not just through what you build, but through how you build it.