Why we're building an in-person business

Quick context: we're two brothers + 1 employee at ~$20k MRR, profitable with decent MoM growth. It's likely we'll hire again in the next few months.

I think a lot about company culture (I've written about optimising for happiness before), and I keep coming back to the fact that I love our work / life balance. We all walk or cycle to the office, there's a great community here and we're becoming regulars in a few of the restaurants. It's just so homely. I think we're creating a happy place to work.

I've worked in distributed teams, in-person and solo on various projects, each has had their pros and cons. I've come to realise that the best jobs have had amazing culture. Oftentimes it's working with someone really nice.

Hypothesis: Culture is more important than Skill

I want to keep it local. The local talent pool is by definition more limited to the national or global pool. That said, I know that local population (500,000) isn't insignificant. In fact, even I just considered my school friends, I could hire some smart, honest people.

And so, it comes to hiring. The next few employees, customer success and marketing should fit my hypothesis. But what about engineering? There's a lot of talent around, but will we find the wonderful ones?

I'd love to hear your stories about what makes a job enjoyable...