Building a company from the ground up is not a linear journey. There are a series of unpredictable turns and some expected ones which not only shape your business, but your leadership, your culture and even your belief in what is possible.

At Elixr Labs, our first year was marked by one such turning point: a hiring crisis that tested our patience and our understanding of what motivates people. Today, we are often asked how we went from struggling to hire the right fit to successfully onboarding 50 people in that year.

The real story has less to do with traditional HR strategies and more to do with an unconventional decision that ended up reshaping the energy of the entire team. We flipped the script and announced 25 iPhones for the team as an incentive if we achieve the goals we have set.

The first year of Elixr Labs was a whirlwind with tight deadlines and endless decisions, but nothing has drained our energy quite like our hiring struggles. Finding the right people was proving to be harder than we expected. We were interviewing constantly yet making almost no progress and HR said that we were interviewing the wrong people.

Breaking the Challenge into Three Simple Steps

To turn the situation around, I focused on stripping the process back to its fundamentals. What seemed like a huge, overwhelming problem could be easily reframed into three simple steps:

1. Setting a clear hiring goal

The first step was making clarity in our decisions. We needed numbers which are real and measurable. To do that we set a simple target: the number of people we needed to hire within a specific time.

2. Calculating the number of interviews needed per day

Once we knew the goal, we reverse-engineered it. If we needed 50 new hires, then how many interviews did we need to conduct every day? This single calculation gave us a realistic and trackable pathway. It turned guesswork into strategy.

3. Evaluating potential, not past achievements

This was the real turning point. Instead of scanning resumes for recognisable brand names or impressive job titles, we began looking if this person has the drive to learn and grow. Recruiting based on potential is riskier as it requires intuition, patience and time but it also builds a stronger foundation. One thing to remember is that the past achievements show where someone has been and not how far they can go.

The Unusual Solution: 25 iPhones

We needed something that would shake everyone out of the slump, something symbolic, bold and energising as well. So, I made an unconventional decision.

I announced that if we achieved the goals, I would distribute 25 iPhones across the team. I believe that motivation is rarely about the object. It is about the meaning the object carries. In our case, the iPhones represented recognition, teamwork and the feeling of being part of something that rewarded effort.

And the result? 50 new hires that year.

With clarity, commitment and motivation, we did not just hit our goal, we were able to get it doubled. We hired 50 people within that year, and many of them are still with us today, contributing to the ongoing growth of Elixr Labs.

The pressure turned into passion. The frustration turned into collaboration. The incentive turned into a symbol of our shared win. And the experience left us with a lesson far bigger than the outcome.

What Building from Scratch Really Teaches You

When you are building from zero, you do not have the luxury of doing things in the usual way. You may also not have big systems or long-established processes. What you do have is resourcefulness and the willingness to make unconventional choices.

Here’s the real lesson I took from that year:

When you are stuck, stop relying on what works and try what feels unusual. The breakthroughs in early-stage building almost never come from any motivational or guidebooks. They come from:

• A reframing of the problem
• A willingness to experiment
• A boldness to try something untraditional
• A belief that your team will rise to a challenge if you give them something meaningful to rise toward.

And here the solution did not look like better software and bigger budgets. It was a simple incentive which was an unexpected idea that unlocked new energy.

Leadership Lessons

Boldness is a leadership skill and sometimes the most unusual solution is exactly the one that moves you and helps you forward. Every founder has a moment like the one we faced at Elixr Labs, a moment where the usual approaches stopped working and the only path forward was to think differently.

Moments like this teaches you lessons that no leadership book can fully prepare you for. A few things I learned was that leadership is about energy before strategy, unconventional decisions are often the most effective ones, and trust grows when leaders show commitment.

What is the one lesson building from scratch has taught you? Because in the end, it is these lessons and not the perfect strategy or the perfect timing that will shape the future of what we build.