Mongoose might be a software-as-a-service company, but the business has flourished thanks to people – both its employees and its customers.
“Empathy is the secret sauce to success,” said David Marshall, president.
The Orchard Park-based company’s product integrates with existing software used by college staff and allows them to communicate with students via text and web chat platform.
Over the last about 18 months, the startup has expanded from about 600 customers to nearly 800. The business, founded in 2015, adds between 100 and 120 new colleges as customers each year and also has the opportunity to grow its user base through existing clients. For example, a college could start out using Mongoose in its admissions office and add on other offices and departments over time.
Higher education faces many challenges, some exasperated by the pandemic, such as declining enrollment and revenue trends and rising costs. It’s leading some institutions to try different approaches, like using Mongoose.
“We are in a world right now in the United States where there’s a shifting landscape in higher education,” Marshall said. “The shift was happening for many years, but Covid accelerated it. Colleges have realized they need to change the way they communicate with their customers to meet them the way they want to learn.”
Along with software as a service, the startup also provides a “full solution” to users, which includes proper onboarding, sharing best practices and check-in calls. It’s that personal service that allows the technology to be successful.
“When we talk about texting, the reason why it’s so effective is because it’s so personal,” he said. “If they weren’t provided best practices and we didn’t hold their feet to the fire, it’d burn medium and do students a disservice.”
Then there are people on Mongoose’s team. The business, which employs about 58, focuses on hiring people who align with its corporate values and care about higher education. For example, more than half of its 18-person customer success team came from the higher education field.
In 2019, as the business was rapidly growing, Mongoose leadership crafted corporate values that include being client obsessed and ensuring people are valued, trust each other and are “intellectually secure."
Those points are used to evaluate the startup’s performance each business quarter, assigning a grade to each value. When new staff are recruited and interviewed, there’s a spreadsheet of those values that are used in the evaluation process.
“We create that as an expectation for ourselves,” Marshall said. “We’ve operationalized those values.”
Mongoose has about 20,000 people actively using its platform each month, and last year, those people used the startup to communicate with about 12 million students.
“Higher education is full of people that really care and really want to help,” he said. “The availability of tools that help them do that at scale is the issue.”
