Culture Stack

2025—26 · Founder, design, build

Can you see your cultural fit with a company before you commit?

In my words

Culture Stack is based on a simple question: can you see your cultural fit with a company before you commit? And going further, can you assess it without having to take a test?

The short answer to both is: yes. You absolutely can.

While that sadly didn’t materialize into PMF, the whole undertaking was a journey of solving one difficult problem after another.

The idea started as a personal problem. At a previous job, I experienced being a severe cultural misfit. Serendipitously, I stumbled across Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map (a classic!). That was a true eye-opener. As a long-time listener and fan of Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast (before it turned shit) and a reader of organizational psychology papers, I found myself in disbelief: it’s the culture, stupid! How did I not see that?

I spent five months going deep into the literature and created my own cultural assessment framework, based on observable behavior. Then a good couple of months operationalizing it. I was driven. Only if I could get test-grade results without asking users to fill in a questionnaire would I call it a product.

And so I did.

I won’t reveal the secret sauce of the engine I created. But simply put: it derives cultural friction potential from what is already written down, a company’s public trace and a person’s CV.

Culture StackYour footprint · vs. candidate

KOMFBKENTKOOVERHIEFBLINTEMOANP

your line distance = friction

Lucia B.Bereichsleiterin · CV + cover letter

Rundum nah an euch

A ten-dimension culture profile, animated. The black line is the team. The coloured part shows how far a candidate is from it: green is close, amber is some friction, red is a lot. The people are made up.

How it went — 2025—26

Mar 11Start
First commit. After five months in the literature, the framework goes into code.
Mar 29Identity
Ten stripes. One coloured stripe for each of the ten dimensions.
Apr 12Brand
One system. “Culture” in bold, the product name in italics.
May 11Pivot
Consumer product killed. 16,100 lines deleted. The first business version was a dashboard.
May 30First user
Pilot. The team’s profile on top, candidates sorted by friction. A real client tested it on his own hires.
Jun 10Turn
Pain-first. Colour only the gap between team and candidate. Full bars made people think more was better.
Jun 22Interface
Person first, verdict second. Initials and the last three jobs first, then the culture read.
Jul 1Map
Scale, not zoom. Teams placed by how culturally close they are to leadership.
Aug 6Trajectory
Press play. The map plays year by year. People appear when they join and fade when they leave.
Aug 10Launch
CultureClaim. A self-serve version for the US, on the same engine.
Aug—SepPMF test
San Francisco. Two months of pitch nights, hackathons and conversations. The demand wasn’t there.
SepStopped
Error 404: PMF not found. “Doing it was a good decision. So was stopping it.”

From the reposubstrate-fit-app / CLAUDE.md

Written 11 May 2026, the day the consumer product was cut. Every screen was checked against these four. Original German, with a short English line under each.

1. Wenn eine Funktion keine Aktion hat, ist sie keine Funktion.If a function has no action, it isn’t a function.

Eine Metrik ohne Entscheidung ist Dekoration. Ein Screen ohne nächsten Schritt ist eine Sackgasse. Information die nichts ändert ist Rauschen. Das Produkt misst nicht. Es macht handlungsfähig.

2. Das Produkt verschwindet in der Benutzung.The product disappears into use.

Wie ein Stuhl, eine Maus, ein großer Kameramann. Du bemerkst nicht das Produkt, du bemerkst was es dir ermöglicht.

3. Menschliche Tragweite wird ernst genommen.Human weight is taken seriously.

Menschen sind keine Datenpunkte. Eine Absage ist ein realer Moment. Business-Logik darf scharf sein. Die menschliche Ebene muss warm sein.

4. Das Produkt ist genuinely helpful.The product is genuinely helpful.

Niemand soll sich hilflos fühlen. Jeder Fehlerfall hat einen nächsten Schritt, jede Sackgasse hat einen Ausweg.

Wordmark

First commit: 2026-03-11
Builds: 86 · 329 commits
Surfaces: culturestack.de · cultureclaim.com
Pilot: One engaged user
State: Stopped, Sep 2026

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This site is under construction. Where the text sounds like Claude, it was written by Claude. I'll rewrite it by hand. Code of honor.