Reflecting On My Past 3 Years At An Early-Stage Software Company
Recently, I left Northpass after almost 3 meteoric and formative years. Some reflections on what made working at Northpass feel different than working other places and what I learned along the way:
1/Ownership
2/Imposter Syndrom
3/Pragmatism
4/Writing
5/Customer-Centricity
6/Intentionality
7/APIs
1/Ownership
You need to own something to truly care about its outcome. A metric, a project, a campaign — ownership is crucial.
Owning something means you’ll take care of the problems that come with owning it. When you own something, you take care of it. (Think about how you treat an Airbnb vs. how you treat your home.)
When you start taking ownership of problems, something pretty magical happens: you begin to come up with solutions.
At Northpass, we aim to look at problems and ask ourselves “how do I fix this?” Not, “how do I improve this?”
Improvements are often a ‘duct tape’ (temporary) fix in our eyes. We are builders who construct products, processes, and procedures to stand the test of time.
Henry Ford once famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
The point illustrates an ‘improvement’ would have been faster horses, but the ‘fix’ was creating the automobile.
Northpass is creating the automobile, not a faster horse.
2/Imposter Syndrom
Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success. ‘Imposters’ suffer from chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that override any feelings of success or external proof of their competence.
Northpass was the first place where I got the chance to lead a sizable team, manage a significant budget, and sit on an executive team. The opportunity was unbelievably rewarding and often intimidating.
I’d regularly feel the need to prove my worth to compensate for my lack of experience. The feeling often overwhelmed me and led to me working deep into the nights, studying and researching current topics so as to be overly prepared.
Looking back on my time at Northpass, I learned:
- You were hired for YOUR opinion. Have confidence in yourself and voice your thoughts. You know so much more than you give yourself credit for.
- Plenty of people suffer from imposter syndrome. From me to the best marketers in the world like Ryan Bonnici, CMO at G2 (source.) We all deal with it, so understand you’re not alone in the feeling.
- Learning is part of growing. If you feel like you are lacking in any areas, reach out to those who have gone before you and done the things you want to do. (When you do this, view it as leadership debt. When you reach up for help, make sure to reach back down and pull others up with you.)
3/Pragmatism
Simply put, I’ve learned to value progress > perfection. In SaaS today, it’s so important to have a self-starter mindset, and Northpass did a great job of cultivating an entrepreneurial culture.
In SaaS, everything moves at the speed of light. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, describes building a startup as “throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.”
If you want to build a plane before you hit the ground, you can’t start with a Boeing 757. You need to move fast and iterate. The initial goal is to start flying so you don’t crash and burn.
At first, your plane might look like some old cardboard box you used to play in as a kid — but guess what? You’re flying.
4/Writing
I learned early on at Northpass — clear and concise writing is fundamental to the success of our team. The realization came when I first started at Northpass, as we were a fully distributed team.
It became apparent as a team operating almost exclusively on Slack — clarity of writing reflects clarity of thinking.
George Orwell once said, “good writing is like a windowpane.” And it couldn’t be more true. Bad writing, on the contrary, is like a closed door.
Simply put — better writing leads to better work.
5/Customer-Centricity
At Northpass, the relationships we’ve built with our customers have become one of our biggest channels of growth.
From helping them find value in our product, to creating internal champions who become evangelists of Northpass — relationships are everything to us.
I’m going to explain how people buy SaaS products by breaking down a situation we’ve all faced.
Imagine you’re at the store in search of your next toothbrush. You know you want the best toothbrush, but you are overwhelmed by options. Most people take one of two paths:
- They take a personal recommendation and trust a toothbrush brand one of their friends told them about. (I like to call this the ’Shoots and Ladders Buying Approach’ because you can skip all the research steps and jump right into the sale.)
- They search a phrase like ‘best toothbrush’ and research options from several sources they find reputable.
This is exactly how people are buying software products today. So what does this mean for software companies?
Companies need to do everything they can to ensure customers see value in their products/services, create evangelists out of their customers, and encourage referrals.
For most companies (particularly in saturated markets), option 1 is easier to execute because it has a compounding benefit. The more evangelists you create, the more referrals organically come in.
At the end of the day creating a product and experience, people actually want to use (and a team they love to work with) is the easiest way to win.
6/Intentionality
It’s the nature of a startup to be overwhelmed with ‘mission-critical’ tasks. We must constantly pick and choose where to focus our attention, even as we’re being pulled in every direction.
Defining the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of a culture helps make the right thing easy to do so teams don’t get caught in analysis paralysis.
Tim Cook of Apple said, “Companies that get confused, that think their goal is revenue or stock price or something. You have to focus on the things that lead to those.”
At Northpass, having focus and being intentional about everything we do has grown to be a true competitive differentiator for us.
7/APIs
Chances are your favorite apps like Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, and other apps utilize numerous third-party APIs and webhooks running in the background.
You would never know it, but these apps need to save time and money by building on top of existing platforms. API-first companies like Twilio, Segment, Mixpanel, and many more are building some of the biggest companies in SaaS by offering a platform for others to build on top of.
Northpass has the opportunity to do the same thing in the Learning Management System space by giving companies a platform to build custom learning wherever they need it through intuitive APIs.
Which is why I’m starting The API Economy. APIs are complicated but essential. Find out how API-first companies are slowly building the infrastructure of the internet one API call at a time in this monthly newsletter.
What’s Next For Me?
I’m grateful for Northpass’ Founder & CEO Steve Cornwell and for the entire Northpass team for giving me the opportunity to lead marketing for 3 incredible years.
Next for me, I’m embarking on a new journey as the Head of Growth at Onna.
Onna centralizes data from your favorite apps to deliver a connected enterprise, supercharged with machine learning and unified search — all in one place.
