The Village of Orchard Park is known for its quaint collection of restaurants and small businesses.
Squint, though, and you’ll find a business that is growing expansively on the back of its market-leading tech products.
Mongoose hasn’t courted the publicity that often attends such a narrative. It is still solely owned by founder and CEO David Marshall and sells software-as-a-service products into colleges across the U.S.
But that modesty doesn’t overshadow what’s happened: The company has gone from three employees to more than 50 over the past six years. It has grown from a tiny office to more than 12,500 square feet of modern tech workspace across two buildings overlooking East Quaker Street.
And that’s just the beginning. Marshall has spent the past few years aligning the organization for the opportunity ahead, both in servicing clients and building products for them to use. He expects to hire up to 35 software engineers in the coming years, along with growing other teams.
“The flywheel is spinning,” Marshall said. “We now have the infrastructure to add new revenue streams.”
This is how it happened.
An experienced founder
Marshall co-founded his first company, LiquidMatrix, in his dorm room at the University of Dayton. The company built the first online college application in the U.S., prompting the co-founders to drop out of school and move back to Orchard Park, where LiquidMatrix grew to 40 employees and several million in revenue each year.
LiquidMatrix sold to a larger corporation in 2004, where Marshall worked for several more years until he stepped back to focus on his family.
By 2009, he was ready to get back to work, and found a ready market for his services as a higher ed software consultant. Through those projects, Marshall noticed the enormous trouble institutions were having in communicating with their students. Students weren’t picking up their phones or engaging with emails. Sometimes it was hard to even execute a refund check.
“You had college staff literally waiting outside of classes,” Marshall said.
So he built a solution.
Starting in 2015, Marshall divested himself of the aspects of his advisory business and turned Mongoose into a product company. That product, dubbed “cadence,” integrates with existing software used by college staff and allows them to easily communicate with students via text.
“We started with five schools in 2015,” Marshall said. “We found it was tremendously successful.”
Cadence is different from other tools in that it's easy-to-use, interactive and personal. Marshall said community colleges have shared anecdotes about how the software helps them reach students who are drifting away, bringing them back to class and the pathway to a degree.
An early team
Marshall leaned into an experienced team of well-known Western New York software engineers to build cadence. They included Andrew Veatch, who was director of software development at Campus Labs before joining Mongoose as vice president of product development in 2016; Mark Taylor, who joined Mongoose in 2016 and is now vice president of user experience and product design; and Nicholas Forysinski, who joined in 2017 and is now lead software developer.
Having experienced engineers who are familiar with the higher ed industry helped Mongoose quickly hit its mark, especially since it built the platform in concert with a group of early adopters, Marshall said. College professionals are looking for vendors who speak their language, not generalized solutions.
The company added 30 colleges the next year and has been onboarding between 100 to 150 colleges using its platform since.
Mongoose now has about 600 customers. Some of them use cadence across all departments; some use it in a more limited way. With about 2,500 potential customers in the U.S., Mongoose has a long runway before it maxes out its initial market.
And Marshall also recognizes room to grow within its existing footprint. It built a second product, an intelligent virtual assistant that helps people navigate college websites. It’s much more than answering rudimentary questions – the virtual assistant is sophisticated enough to walk a student through and complete a transcript request.
Learning and growing
Marshall’s previous experience at LiquidMatrix helped him navigate the first few years at Mongoose. But at some point, the new company grew well beyond the scope of his first one.
Projects like building out the profile of a customer success position, and then hiring an entire team of them, have taken time to perfect.
Marshall said the key has been in creating a company where the team buys into the company’s mission. Without investors, they are their “own bosses,” able to meaningfully experiment without pressure from outside stakeholders.
“Our employees are very close to each other,” he said. “They come to work, they kill it and then they go home to their families.”
Marshall joined a local Vistage group that has helped him tackle challenges, both past and looming. For one thing, if Mongoose continues to grow at this rate then it is going to need a larger office in the coming years. Marshall said the team is already talking about its options on that front.
Building a pipeline of technology talent is another majority priority.
“We’ve gotten by with a very small engineering team,” he said. “But we’re at a point now where we need more horses and we want to start developing our own as well."
